Something I wrote in 2024 — before my wife and I moved to Spain — nicely sets the stage for today’s story.
It goes a long way to illustrating what I mean when I say I don’t believe in the honeymoon period in the way most of the world attaches it to moving abroad or doing other big things. I think many people accept the honeymoon period as fact because it’s an easy way for them to burst your bubble.
Well, you’re excited now, but that’s your emotion and excitement talking. Just wait until real life starts!
We’ve both been soberly assessing and anticipating every step of the process of making this move. Assessing the moments as we live them — after 19 months in Valencia — and anticipating what would come next and how it might feel.
For me, a constant has been a rejection of the typical way people frame the honeymoon period — which leads us to my thoughts from 2024:
I also feel like we have already lived the so-called honeymoon period and will hit the ground running (and living) right away in Spain…
Time has a way of creating certainty or leading you to realize that you really don’t want to do something as bad as you thought you did after all. Giving yourself time and space between making a decision you can still change and the point where you can’t or would have a harder time turning back is probably a good idea…
Time has mellowed out the excitement from post-vacation euphoria — which feels great so there’s no reason to suppress it — to something decidedly practical. To the notion that as much as we’re changing our lives, we’re really just enhancing — upgrading — our existing lifestyle and — subsequently — our quality of life.
Put another way, the more euphoria-like excitement came and went with the decision to move in the first place.
We didn’t move to experience a rush.
We moved to continue doing life in a place where we recognized the advantages immediately because we knew the environment we were leaving. Because that’s pretty much all we had to concretely compare it to — that and our accumulated knowledge of places, how they make us feel, and how we operated inside of them.
This is the critical part for anybody considering a move abroad or any other decision where people like to say the novelty will wear off. Such as retirement, starting a new job, or even — to reluctantly use another well-traveled phrase — following your passion.
Within the context of moving —
You arrive. Really, you know very little. All you have are your recent reference points. For us that was the United States and, specifically, Los Angeles. Then as that reference point fades and you accumulate experience and time on the ground in your new place, you know more and build new baseline reference points. So you start to expect more from your environment, especially when you see and experience what exists in your environment relative to what you see happening elsewhere as part of your accumulation of new experiences.
So, for me, part of that is seeing what Barcelona and Paris have done from an urban planning perspective and comparing them to similar things Valencia has done — or stopped doing thanks to a political shift to the right.
If you subscribe to the conventional honeymoon narrative, you might interpret any criticism of Valencia as evidence that my original enthusiasm was naïve. But recognizing that this city has work to do doesn’t negate any of the reasons why I love living here.
Just because it’s better as a city from urban planning, quality of life, and other standpoints than what you’re likely to find throughout most of the United States doesn’t mean it’s without problems or progress to make.
As time creates more space between where you came from (LA) and where you are now (Valencia), and you have new and diverse experiences (day-to-day living, seeing other places for the first time or from fresh perspectives), your old reference point fades.
Somewhere around this juncture, I stopped comparing Valencia to Los Angeles and Spain to the United States as much as I used to. I changed my baseline because my field of vision and experience expanded.
So I “complain” about things here more now. That’s not the part of the honeymoon narrative I reject. The recalibration is real.
It’s a recalibration in which ‘better than the United States’ stops being a sufficient or helpful standard. When you see how things are done elsewhere in relation to where you came from, hopefully you evolve to expecting the place you live in now to meet its own possibilities. You don’t sit around the table with other “expats” bemoaning “bureaucracy,” complaining because the clerk didn’t speak English, or noting where you can find Philadelphia Cream Cheese.
Your life exists in your new setting.
You see Valencia’s incredible bicycle infrastructure. Then you see that progress stunted at the same time as you witness more great strides in Barcelona and Paris. Criticism becomes something you contribute as one type of insider, not commentary delivered from an outside perspective living in the past that has very little to do with the present.
You know you’re becoming part of a place when you stop treating its problems as local color and start caring whether they get fixed.
To me, this is integration.
It’s not the moment when everything feels completely familiar — because it still doesn’t. It’s the moment when you start to feel like you have a dog in the fight because you’re walking and riding your bike on these streets and sitting in these plazas and supporting these local businesses. And doing this life right here and right now.
When my wife read an early version of this, she told me I was basically describing the end of the honeymoon period while insisting I don’t believe in it.
This is the work paid subscriptions support: writing about what happens after moving abroad or any other meaningful change becomes ordinary life.