Finding meaning, connections, and a bit of humor in life between cultures.
In Dear Julia, psychologist Julia Jones answers readers’ questions about life between cultures, exploring what it takes to build meaning and connection as an international in Denmark while staying true to yourself. You can submit a question anonymously here or learn more about Jaywalk, Julia’s therapy practice for internationals. Questions are quoted as written, in full or in part.
Dear Julia,
I have moved to Denmark with my wife 7 years ago and we now live here with our 3yo son. I have been feeling quite isolated here, and this feeling has been increasing gradually over time as, it seems to be at least, the connections to my homeland gradually grow weaker.
Being away from the daily discussed has taken its toll, and talking only on special occasions or when we’re there, is not enough to grow or maintain the closeness I once had with family and friends. We are doing our best to make sure our son has his own network of friends, since we might not be able to provide us that organically, but I myself feel kind of, while not sad, distanced as much from the people abroad as from the people I know here, from which I don’t consider any to be friends. This is one issue.
The other is that I keep reflecting if, 10-15 years from now, I will still consider to have taken the correct decision in deciding to stay here, while also being sure that deciding to go back might also be regretted in that time frame.
Anyway, life as an emigrant is not easy, and I really don’t know what to do.
Thank you.
Fighting not to fit
Dear “Fighting not to fit”
Thank you for sharing your dilemma with me. I can relate to your pain about feeling distanced from both the people in your home country and those here. Your letter touches on something deeply seated in all of us. Our need to feel connected to others.
Psychology defines loneliness as the negative feelings that arise when our relationships are not what we desire them to be, either in number or closeness. Faced with having exactly this problem, your mind does what it’s evolved to do: it tries to find a solution. It does that by showing you pictures of a lonely future in Denmark and pictures of the past in your country of origin. You are wondering if Denmark will fall short in providing you with the warmth and connections that filled your past. And yet, you know that leaving Denmark and moving back would come with its own set of sacrifices.
You are not alone in feeling this way. I have heard many stories of internationals feeling trapped in Denmark, in one way or another. Career and social life are common areas where reality has fallen short of expectations. And yet, benefits in other areas of life make many wonder if they have to accept their situations to keep hold of those.
But let us come back to your specific situation. If the air in front of you began to shimmer and, in a puff of smoke, your 80-year-old self appeared from the future to give you advice, what do you think he or she would say? Your older self has lived the years you are worried about and knows how the story ends. I wouldn’t be surprised if he or she thanked you for being honest about how you feel, because it’s always the first step. I invite you to do this exercise in a quiet spot, maybe with a notebook to jot down your thoughts. Have a conversation with your wise self. Maybe you already know the answers you are looking for.
What I hear in your letter is a shift in priorities. When you first moved, your choices were guided by certain values and goals. Perhaps you focused on your career and starting a family. Those made sense at the time. But seven years later, something else is stirring. The values that served you in achieving what you have built over the past seven years fall short in creating a full and meaningful life across all areas of life.
Meanwhile, people back home have continued their lives. They are not who they were when they were part of your everyday world, and neither are you. When we moved abroad, we chose one version of life and said goodbye to another. The old has gone. We cannot simply slot ourselves back into that life, however tempting it feels on lonely days.
You’re right in intuiting that it’s time to make a decision. But I would challenge the notion that it’s the decision whether or not to stay in Denmark. I think it’s the decision to either accept your social isolation or to start behaving in a way that supports you in building more and closer relationships.
We can learn skills that can help us handle negative thoughts and feelings related to social isolation more effectively. This might be necessary if we cannot, or do not want to, make space for prioritizing building relationships. However, if you are able and want to focus on building more and closer relationships in your life, then I know this is possible, also in Denmark.
Denmark has a reputation of being a country where it’s difficult for internationals to make friends. Partly this is cultural. Danes rarely bring people they meet in public spaces into their private lives. It’s like an invisible barrier. They value a few close, private, and long-lasting friendships over a wider network of more recent, friendly connections.
However, close to a million people in Denmark have a culture other than Danish in their heritage; they either were born abroad or have parents who were born abroad. So, even if Danes are hard to befriend, the adage that their closedness to new connections lies at the heart of internationals’ social isolation can only be part of the story.
Maybe there are other reasons. For example, many internationals come to Denmark during their late 20s, 30s, and 40s, when everyone is busy with work and family. It’s simply not a life stage that lends itself to making friends easily.
However, it is important to reflect on the outer context to an inner wish to feel more connected. But what might be even more important to understand is our individual inner context: our thoughts, feelings, experiences, memories, attachment styles, and beliefs we hold about ourselves, others, and the world. They will shape our ability to be open to making new connections. Making friends anywhere, and at any age, requires that we let our guards down, tell people about our wish to connect, be vulnerable, and risk getting rejected. We need to be able to give people the benefit of the doubt, and see them in a good light, if we want them to return the favour.
In my opinion, your task is less to decide whether to pull up the stakes and move to greener friendship pastures. I believe your task is to make a conscious decision on how you want to behave in the future that can support you in breaking out of the bubble of isolation.
In my work, I call these behavioral guidelines that we choose to follow to help us create a meaningful life ‘values’. These behavioral guidelines are about your outer behavior but also about how you want to handle your doubts, judgments, or other inner experiences that hold you back from building connections.
In order to work, values need to be put into action. The first step is to make space for your new behavioral guidelines in your life. To allocate time to making friends. The second step is to get deliberate on how you want to open up to connections. In my experience, the trick is to meet people through something that already matters to you. When you show up for something you enjoy or believe in, you naturally find others who care about the same things. That is where connection grows.
As a final word, I want you to know this. If, after reflection on how you want to live, you realize that going back truly fits who you are now, then that is also valid. The goal is not to prove that staying was right. It is to live a life that feels coherent and meaningful.
Kierkegaard wrote that choice is both our freedom and our burden. To choose one life always means giving up another. We long for certainty, but we never get it. What we do get is the chance to decide with awareness, to say, ‘this is the life I will live, even without guarantees’.
Wherever you choose to be, the work starts now: to build a life that your eighty-year-old self would look at with warmth and say, ‘yes, that was worth it.’ And for that, it probably matters less where you live than how you live.
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Dear Julia appears twice a month in Last Week in Denmark. You can submit your own question anonymously here. Julia is a psychologist who provides therapy for internationals. Find out more about Julia’s work at www.jaywalk.dk, where you can join her mailing list for updates, upcoming events, and small pieces of inspiration. You are also welcome to connect with her on LinkedIn.