Culture Shock and the Modern American Marriage: Why Expat Life Tests What You Think You Know About Love
Tuesday, October 28, 2025.
After 3 years in Berlin, Pedro and Milly came home with matching bicycles, a bilingual dog—and a marriage running on fumes.
He’d joined an architecture firm.
She’d mastered the art of buying bread that could break your heart—Brötchen, crusted like small moons. They had friends, rhythm, and the kind of intimacy born of deciphering subway maps in another language.
Now they were back in Boston, standing in a supermarket staring at twenty kinds of sandwich loaf.
Pedro muttered about parking tickets; Milly cried in front of the cucumbers. “It’s the same country,” she said, “but it feels like it doesn’t need us.”
They told me this six weeks after landing. The dog still refuses Wonder bread as a treat .
They’re part of a quiet American migration you won’t find in airport statistics—the couples who go abroad in love and return in translation.
Adventure as a Marital Stress Test
Couples rarely come in saying, “We’re in intercultural distress.” They say, “We can’t stop fighting about toothpaste.”
Research on American expat families confirms what therapy rooms have long whispered: it’s not the move that breaks you—it’s who you must become to survive it. When one partner becomes the mission and the other the context, affection starts to feel like logistics.
Trailing partners, often women, experience steep drops in identity continuity and career satisfaction (Harvey, 1995; Sterle et al., 2018). The glamorous move abroad becomes a quiet erasure.
In one study, Yvonne McNulty (2015) found that some expat divorces can spiral into financial and psychological collapse—what she called “support shock.”
But most unravelings begin not with betrayal but with the kind of unspoken deal that keeps peace for too long:
Whose career counts more? Who will adapt? Who will be lonely?As one husband said, “It wasn’t Germany that changed us. It was the silence that followed us there.”
Silence travels.
Attachment Abroad
Expat life is an attachment amplifier. The avoidantly inclined often bloom abroad—finally no small talk, no PTA committees. The anxiously attached wilt—too much distance, too few mirrors.
When we change continents, our nervous systems don’t update their passports.
Bowlby might say our secure base suddenly became a moving target. Every missed flight and unfamiliar grocery queue becomes a miniature stress test of trust.
The couples who thrive learn to turn curiosity inward: to treat each other as another country worth learning.
The Long Layover Called Repatriation
Repatriation sounds wholesome—re-patria, a return to the fatherland—but feels like jet lag of the soul.
Recent reviews call it “identity dissonance”: the home you loved doesn’t recognize you anymore (Černigoj et al., 2024). Erikson might call it a re-run of identity versus role confusion.
Post-pandemic, remote work turned wanderlust into lifestyle, and thousands of American couples tried to make marriage borderless.
But coming home reintroduces gravitas.
Therapy for repatriates is less about “adjustment” and more about translation.
The goal isn’t to erase Berlin but to integrate it. The challenge is that nostalgia edits memory—home becomes myth, and myth becomes disappointment.
One client laughed bitterly: “We left as Americans with passports. We came back as anthropologists who can’t find decent bread.”
The Myth of the Great American Escape
Every few years, some smartass proclaims a “mass American exodus.”
In reality, maybe five to nine million Americans live abroad (Association of Americans Resident Overseas, 2024).
Some teach, some contract, some chase health care and stability.
Only a few thousand renounce citizenship each year—about the size of a small college town—but Twitter magnifies each act into an opera of performative conscience.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu might say expat life is a performance of cultural capital—proving you’re worldly enough to transcend your ZIP code.
But adventure doesn’t immunize anyone from human friction. Geography can’t fix psychology.
Anne-Wil Harzing once wrote that not all expatriation is exile—sometimes it’s expansion. True. But expansion always costs something.
Coming Home to a Different America
Repatriation hits harder because “home” itself has changed.
The modern American family is more compressed and less predictable.
Nearly one in five Americans now lives in a multigenerational household (Pew Research Center, 2022). Marriage and divorce rates are historically low (CDC, 2024), fertility continues to dip (CDC, 2025).
The Boston they came back to wasn’t the same city. Four rents, three roommates, and a whole lot of people sharing kitchens with their parents.
The frontier’s gone; we sublet it to each other.
In a country that confuses busyness with belonging, coming home can feel smaller than leaving ever did. Love has to shrink to fit the room.
Coming home now means re-entering a country that has outsourced intimacy to productivity. For couples who once shared adventure, that recalibration can feel claustrophobic. Love is suddenly domestic again—literally.
The Class Problem No One Mentions
Most research on expats assumes privilege: corporate relocations, diplomatic visas, wine tastings.
But there’s another population—nurses, nannies, soldiers, aid workers—who move for survival, not self-discovery. Their marriages face the same attachment strains with fewer buffers and resources.
When we talk about “expat culture shock,” we should remember: for many Americans abroad, the shock began long before the border.
Therapy and the Art of Re-entry
Ruth Van Reken, chronicler of Third Culture Kids, calls mobility “a lifelong grief with frequent-flyer miles” (Van Reken, 2017).
Therapy for returning couples often looks like this:
Name the Deal. Be explicit about whose turn it is to rebuild (Harvey, 1995; Kierner, 2017).
Ritualize the Goodbye. Closure is a ceremony, not a calendar event.
Expect the Dip. Re-entry distress peaks at six to twelve months (Černigoj et al., 2024).
Audit Your Story. Decide what the narrative of “Germany” means before resentment writes it for you.
Find Your New Bread. The thing that rises again in a different oven—whether a friend, a hobby, or a local bakery.
One spouse put it best: “I thought I missed the city. Turns out, I missed the version of us that was paying attention.”
FAQ
Why do so many expat marriages wobble after returning home?
Because re-entry is a three-fold collision: identity loss, role renegotiation, and cultural whiplash. Partner adjustment remains the strongest predictor of satisfaction (Sterle et al., 2018).
What is reverse culture shock?
It’s the psychic lag between who you became abroad and who the world expects you to be here. In short: your body’s back, your soul’s still in customs. Read more about reverse culture shock in relationships.
Can therapy help?
Maybe—if you use it not to “fix” your partner but to reintroduce yourselves to each other. Think of it as translation, not repair.
A Small Benediction
You don’t have to go back to who you were. You can begin from where you are.
The air here kinda smells different, but it’s still breathable. Isn’t it?
If your marriage feels suspended somewhere between Berlin and Boston, therapy can help you land gently, without losing what the journey taught you.
Contact me here.
And if you ever find a bakery that smells like the one in Prenzlauer Berg—buy two loaves. Your dog will remember.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Adler, N. J. (1984). Women in international management: Where are they? California Management Review, 26(4), 78–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/41165099
Association of Americans Resident Overseas. (2024). How many Americans live abroad? https://www.aaro.org/living-abroad/how-many-americans-live-abroad
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2024). Marriage and divorce — FastStats.https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2025, April 23). U.S. births increase by 1% in 2024.https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/releases/20250423.html
Černigoj, A., et al. (2024). Systematic literature review of factors influencing re-entry stress and adaptation to one’s heritage culture. International Journal of Intercultural Relations. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2024.101941
Harvey, M. G. (1995). The impact of dual-career families on international relocations. Human Resource Management Review, 5(3), 223–244.
Kierner, A. (2017). Repatriation of international dual-career couples (Master’s thesis). University of Vaasa. https://osuva.uwasa.fi/bitstreams/1569e7eb-dac5-46e7-94b2-215d4381a2f9/download
McNulty, Y. (2015). Till stress do us part: The causes and consequences of expatriate divorce. Journal of Global Mobility, 3(2), 106–136. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-06-2014-0023
Pew Research Center. (2022, March 24). The demographics of multigenerational households.https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/03/24/the-demographics-of-multigenerational-households/
Sterle, M. F., Welker, C. L., & Gryczan, L. (2018). Expatriate family adjustment: An overview of empirical evidence on challenges and resources. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1207. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01207
Van Reken, R. E. (2017). For Third Culture Kids, travel is home. Condé Nast Traveler.https://www.cntraveler.com/story/for-third-culture-kids-travel-is-home