Basically, this. We can afford to live in places that don’t give us such a high income by now, and we simply like them better. More time to enjoy ourselves, a culture that’s more aligned with our values, and a place we have simply come to love and feel at home every time we’ve visited. So we’re not primarily looking for economic opportunity now, we’re looking for quality of life… and the US is much, much better at economic opportunity than it is at quality of life.
The chances of dying in a school shooting are extremely rare. The chances of having yourself or somebody you’re close to in the same school as a shooting incident are dramatically higher, and I know few people who haven’t had that much contact with one.
I’m American, and working on engaging to Europe next year.
There are a lot of reasons we want to do that. But just one would have been enough. Last year, I got a text message from my teenage son, during school hours, when he wouldn’t normally have his phone out. It read:
We’re in lockdown. There’s a shooter in the building. Tell everyone I love them?
My son made it out of that incident safely, although sending him back to that school a few days later was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. There was one death, and one boy who was arrested several blocks away for his murder.
I question whether American career benefits are actually all that great, given that you might make more money but have much less time to use it. But it doesn’t matter to me. There’s no career benefit on the face of the earth that’s worth ever having to sit at home, terrified that my child is about to be the next victim of the American epidemic of mass shootings.
Can she have dual citizenship between these two countries, or would her getting US citizenship mean renouncing her original citizenship?
Spain, Portugal, some areas of Greece?
I want to add my reassurance: if he’s not in a place to be thinking of your future together, you need to be thinking of your future alone. Kudos for recognizing that – it’s one of the hardest things to make yourself do, especially if the relationship otherwise feels as if it’s going well at the time. But if you’re strong enough to have made this decision, you’re strong enough to get through the painful time that follows.
And when you’ve done that, you’ll be in exactly the place where you actually want to live, without having to compromise on it.
Good luck!