Creating a Relationship That Fits You: Why to Love on Your Own Terms

💁‍♀️ “Vacations are for the whole family. You shouldn’t go on vacation without your partner.”

💁🏻 “Real couples don’t sleep apart.”

💁🏾 “You need to choose — career or family, you can’t have both.”

💁🏼 “Once you have kids, your relationship just isn’t the priority anymore.”

💁🏽 “If you’re not planning for kids soon, what are you even doing?”

💅 “If the man is financially dependent on the woman for too long, this is a setup for desaster.”

💅🏻 “It is only a real family if there is also a child!”

💅🏼 “If one partner works abroad, the other follows — no questions asked.”

💅🏾 “Long-distance relationships don’t work.”

🤷🏾 “They travel together almost every other weekend. Are we boring?”

🤷 “Their life looks so balanced — are we doing it wrong?”

🤷🏻 “All our friends are buying houses and seem so settled — are we behind? Will we be without real friends if we keep doing this?”

🤷🏼 “Everyone is going out for Valentine’s Day. Do I have to get her a gift? She said she does not want one. Or does she?”

These messages don’t always arrive as direct advice. Sometimes they show up in side comments, raised eyebrows, or a quiet sense of being out of sync with “how others do it.”

And over time, they can quietly become the blueprint we try to follow — even when it doesn’t fit who we are.

Also, none of these aren’t necessarily wrong.

But when they go unexamined, they can quietly shape how we judge ourselves — and each other.

Especially for couples who move across borders, are in a cross-cultural relationship, the sense of being out of sync with inherited norms can feel both liberating and lonely.

This post is about that tension — the internal mismatch between what we’re told love and couple life should look like, and what life abroad actually demands.

And about why relocation, disorienting as it can be, offers one rare gift:

a chance to pause, unlearn, and start shaping a relationship that’s built for who you are.

When you move abroad as a couple, careers, routines, family roles — all the structures that once held you together may dissolve or get shuffled.

Naturally, many couples try to recreate what felt familiar.

But trying to recreate someone else’s version of success in a new environment is like running a marathon in someone else’s shoes.

It rarely fits. And it hurts over time.

But here’s the hidden gift:

Life abroad creates space.

Space to question. Space to stop following default settings. Space to be intentional.

You may find that the very distance from what you knew gives you a clearer view of what matters — and what no longer does.

This is the moment to ask:

What if you no longer felt the need to explain your choices (to yourself or others)?

What if questions like “Why don’t you just move back?” or “You really let him take the lead on that?” didn’t throw you off balance — because you knew, deep down, this is what works for us?

That’s the quiet confidence that comes from doing the work of designing your own way as a couple.

Because the couples who thrive across borders, time zones, and life stages aren’t the ones who follow a flawless plan. They’re the ones who stay in conversation — shaping something that actually fits. They aim for alignment — which takes trial, error, and renegotiation.

The goal isn’t to impress anyone. The goal is to create a shared foundation you can stand on, your own rhythm — a quiet baseline of “this is how we do it.”

Something that reflects who you are, not just where you come from.