Break up due to not adjusting to live in the UK

[Himmel]

Hi !

I moved to England before Brexit. I am European. We broke up with my partner of many years because I felt that I couldn’t adjust to the English way of life.

I can’t seem to stop thinking about the break up, if I did the right thing. I miss my ex partner. I am just wondering if I made the right choice and if I could still try a little bit more.. I think it’s way too late for that though. I am miserable. for how long did it take you to adapt ? Also the post Brexit rules confuse me

But are you still in the UK, or did you leave in the aftermath of the breakup? How long ago was it, and how long had you been living in the UK together? It sounds like it’s comprehensively over.

Hi!

I left more than 6 months ago. We spoke some time ago and he wanted me to come back. I didn’t because I didn’t believe I’d be able to adjust. Now I am wondering again. Did I do enough? I spent more or less one year there.

Could you come up with a compromise? Living in the UK for an agreed amount of time and then relocating? I think this also heavily depends on your jobs though.

Culture shock (and reverse culture shock) is real and painful. Homesickness or longing for home comforts, or even rose-tinted glasses on what you feel you lost, make settling hard.
I was a trailing spouse in an EU country. I am back here in the UK (to do with schooling in my case) and I am okay but the country I left is not the country it is now. I do not miss the EU country though because despite being there over a decade, I never felt I truly belonged.
You have to master the language.
You have to find work you can do.
You need to find your tribe.
You need local not just expat bubble friends.
You need to traverse customs and social norms that may be alien to you.
Finally you sometimes need to stay under the radar because of xenophobia.
I am sure these also all apply to the UK.
Have kids with the guy and you would be further stuck unless, like me, after to amicably separate.

So it can take years to assimilate not months and even then, you may resent lack of family/friends you miss from home or sacrifices you feel you made. Total immersion would be not ever contemplating a return to your country of birth as you feel comfy/at home here.
As to Brexit, do you have reason to remain here/have you applied for permanent residency?
My partner and eldest have that without relinquishing their British citizenship because he applied, having lived there 10 years +

A year isn’t very long, admittedly. I just returned to my home country after more than 20 years overseas, and a friend who did similar counselled not to think about whether it was the right move for a minimum of two years!

(Having said that, ten years ago, I did tell my husband I wouldn’t stay in another country we’d moved to for his work after a year and a half there. I loathed it. That was never going to change. He quit his job and came with me.)

However, if you hated your life in the UK enough to end a relationship and move countries, it doesn’t seem likely that returning to the relationship and country will have a different outcome second time around?

It took me a few years to adjust but I like my life now. Making friends was extremely hard for me and took about 6 years.

agreed to (typo)

Ah, read your update. A year not remotely long enough in my opinion but that said, if you know you kind of know. I am sorry you feel sad. I am sure your ex probably does miss you.
None of the problems you had though, will miraculously go away. Not unless you have gone "home" but feel a stranger there too (as I said, reverse culture shock is also well recognised).
As to your status, post Brexit, it may well be trickier now for him to come to you or vice versa in terms of long stay, without marriage involved but I am not sure about working visas etc

My partner and I met in my home country and lived here for quite some time. He holds the British citizenship and passport. He told me the move is permanent. He said the UK is his home from now on but he will always going to miss my country.

I am afraid to be stuck overseas. What if this feeling grows stronger

I agree that insanity = doing the same thing twice but expecting a different result (Einstein?).
What we learn from history is that we do not learn from history (every other sod).
I could return to [insert EU country here] and still hate all the things I hated. I would return there for my partner only, which is a lot of pressure on a relationship. All faultlines in a relationship are magnified in this situation.
I am not telling you not to - look at Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck 20 years later! - BUT you need to ask yourself:
What would you do differently?
How could things be different now as to then?
What has changed apart from you being lonely?
What could he do to change things?
What about if you had children?

take care of yourself
I know how tough it is (my username is appropriate for a change!)

You are not "stuck" if you love your country, job, friends but you do need to move on. He has done his 'stint' in your home country then decided his heart was in the UK. You gave it a year here and decided yours was not. Nothing wrong with that.
You can romanticize it (can't live with or without you) but unless you are just long haul fuck buddies, it won't work honey.

I would do many things differently today if I could. I know history tends to repeat itself.

I had no issues to come back to my home country. I miss him every day and so do our shared friends.

I can’t help but to think if I could have lasted for a few more years and then adapted. I keep in regretting that I gave up and that I was not strong enough to just adapt to the new way of life.

I need to except that he is British and maybe felt the same in my country

Depends on how much you had to adapt to, where you live now, where you lived when you were here.
If, based on your username, you are German, you have decent transport, nature/green policies, focus on sport, family ties, Spargelzeit(!), Bread(!!) jobs based on qualifications and better pay.
You also have directness.
Here, Covi d will have made life harder, anti-German sentiment (from some, not all) will not have made you feel welcome and some are smiling tigers (i.e. two-faced!) It is a different culture (with some similarities e.g. Humour with those you are per Du with).
I don't know what you could do differently as I don't know what you argued about or missed. I do know that mastering the language (and your English is good btw), getting a job and joining activities away from your partner: even that isn't enough sometimes.
What would you do if you came back? Would you be able to get a visa? Would be marry you? What do your friends and family think?

Thanks for replaying! Actually I am from Scandinavia, more specifically Sweden. I family also in Germany.

i felt that my level of English was a problem. I was unable to hold a conversation in English with the locals. So thank you for saying that about my English. I didn’t speak much because I felt quite insecure.

I am used to being around lots of nature and also direct way of speaking, you were right about that too

Hej! :-)
I feel for you, I really do.
I remember emigrating from the UK, thinking I would be fine having conversations with local people and understanding nothing. The learning curve is huge.
I checked out the current sutuation post-Brexit for you. You can visit a partner here on your EU passport for up to six months.
www.gov.uk/check-uk-visa/y/sweden/family
If you wish to work here you need the correct visa: they are valid for up to five years but you would need to input your job type into the link above, to see the type needed. Same as if you wanted to study.
So, if you had savings or your ex can support you, you could visit him and try again for six months, seeing if you can overcome the language barrier/obstacles in your way last time.
But in terms of career, if you wish to work, I think you need a job offer already and an occupation code (for skilled worker, for example, you need to be offered £10.10 an hour/£25k p.A or what the going rate is).
Hope this helps. Lycka till! x

There's loads of places in the UK to live where you can be around nature even if it doesn't seem like it at first - especially where I live in Scotland. I don't know where you were based in the UK but there different ways of life to try in most countries. One thing that can work is to choose a third place where you build a life together - not necessarily a third country but an area of one of your countries that neither of you is from if you see what I mean. Then it becomes your place together and not just one of your places.

I originally went to my DH's country when we got together but couldn't settle there, so we came back to the UK. Eight years later, having been back to his country multiple times to visit, I'm pretty sure I could be happy there if he desperately wanted to go back, but he is a citizen here now and is happy enough, and in his job role is better off here economically. Dual country relationships can be really hard and I didn't realise this before I got into one - when someone is always "not at home" it can be hard to tackle. You're always either out of your own element, or worrying about your partner being out of theirs and having to listen to them talk about why everything is so much better in their home country all the time (kinda joking...but not really.) His country is much further away than the UK is from Sweden so spending time in both wasn't really an option, I don't know if it could be for you.

I don't think you should beat yourself up about not trying harder though, if you're not happy you're not happy, and it doesn't sound like your ex-partner is/was very willing to compromise.

@Himmel - stay where you are. Try to move on from this relationship. Find someone else. Get as busy as possible in your spare time - volunteer, take classes, do a sport or a hobby or join a choir, etc.

If your partner cared about the relationship he would go to you. He has made it clear that he is not going to compromise. He expects to you to make a sacrifice he himself wasn't prepared to make when the two of you moved to the UK.

You should pat yourself on the back for listening to your inner voice and taking it seriously.

Of course that means you are left with all the 'What ifs??' This is the situation with all decisions you make in the early years as an adult. Making one decision forecloses most others and you will always wonder what might have happened if you had done otherwise.

However, it doesn't look as if your partner is troubled by any of the 'what ifs'. He seems to be prepared to draw a line under the relationship. This is a really bad sign. I think he has moved on.

In fairness to her ex, he spent time living with her in Sweden but did not want to live there forever. Brexit was a wake-up call to many, to shit or get off the pot. Unless you were lucky enough to have Irish ancestry, you had to choose whether you wanted citizenship or not or apply for long-term residency status. Many expats came back here and many here went back to the EU because of it.

Indeed. My DH wasn't from the EU and we didn't have that ease of moving even pre-Brexit - many couples don't. Immigration was a grim odyssey for us and we were both very unhappy in each other's countries at times but splitting up wasn't a choice either of us wanted to make. We actually moved to a third country for a year before coming back to the UK (because we were too broke in the third country.) Had to get married sooner than we would likely otherwise have done. Had to leave again and lose jobs and rental before we could get immigration sorted. It beat not being in each other's lives. I'm not saying OP's ex is a terrible person just that he's made his priorities fairly clear - as I suppose, from his perspective, she has too.

There are places in the world I absolutely could not be happy. A year isn't a long time to tell that but it's possible. I don't think OP should confuse understandable regrets with the feeling that she has done something wrong or failed - she hasn't.

I think a year is long enough to know if staying in a country will keep you feeling miserable.