Why Breakups Abroad Are a Disaster
I survived the Russian winters, but I barely survived this.
The power dynamics of a relationship are different when you live abroad with your partner. I should know, I moved to Russia from New York at age 22 to live with my boyfriend. For me, Russia was a strange and scary place to fathom living. When I stepped off the plane, I didn’t speak the language, didn’t know anyone, and didn’t fully understand the culture gap I would encounter. Making this leap of faith for a college boyfriend required a lot of blind, stupid faith. As we would find out, when relationships abroad go wrong, they can go really wrong.
When I first arrived in Russia, I was completely helpless. Not speaking the language, I needed my partner to translate everything for me and help me with every minor task. I couldn’t so much as buy a subway ticket without him in the early days. I remember breaking down in a metro entrance the first week after failing to purchase a card from the ticket lady.
The first few months when I didn’t know anyone, my boyfriend introduced me to his friends. He was patient for a while with the language barrier, but he quickly grew weary of translating whole conversations. In social situations, I mostly sat in silence for long periods, listening to the foreign consonants of his conversations with his friends. Luckily, I’m a fast language learner.
In the U.S., we had unique social circles that didn’t overlap. I hung out with my girlfriends and he hung out with his guy friends. It is very rare when living abroad for partners to not know the same people. Whether hanging in the ex-pat circle (which always feels small no matter where you are) or spending time with other couples, it’s a precarious road. When we finally broke up, our friends all chose a side. His or mine. Not that we asked them to. Yet, all of the girlfriends of all his guy friends stopped contacting me. Well, they were his friends first. Luckily, we broke up after two years of living in Russia, not early on, so I had some friends of my own by then.
But that doesn’t mean that either of us was prepared for the fallout of our impending breakup.
The year my ex and I finally broke up, he was a Master’s student and I was working full-time in Moscow. I found out that he cheated on me, which landed a ballistic missile on our relationship. He relied on me for rent and spending money. I even paid for his clothes and computer. Our Russian friends begged me to take him back (they can overlook a little infidelity I suppose) and even made the argument that he wouldn’t be able to support himself without me. I offered my ex money, but in the end, he took a job to support himself during the rest of his course. I understood that he was in a terrible position to be in by relying on me for money. So, despite the fact that he cheated on me, I felt like a horrible person for cutting him off. And yes, he played that guilt card and painted me as the villain to our friends.
Knowing that the break-up would leave him without a place to stay and without money made me feel guilty. Rather than kick him out right away, I let him continue sleeping on the couch. It was an unhealthy, turbulent experience that I wouldn’t ever repeat. Eventually, he moved in with a buddy for a while before finding his own room to rent. I knew he had people he could rely on and I knew that he would land on his feet. But from his perspective, he was dumped, lost his free flat and his source of income (me). I bet it really sucked to be dumped, have to tell your friends, have to find a place to live, and have to find a job all at once.
Objectively, I can see that the breakup was situationally worse for my ex-boyfriend than it was for me.
At least I still had an apartment, a job, and the friends that didn’t ditch me. Still, I was left with trust issues and a broken heart in the middle of a Russian winter. It’s hard to be emotionally isolated from your friends and family when you’re abroad. After a breakup, the sudden realization of where I was and how far I was from everything that is familiar and comfortable to me was like being plunged into freezing Siberian water. My ex was the person I confided in about everything. He was my rock, my person until he wasn’t anymore.
The shock and heartbreak of learning that my boyfriend is a cheating traitor would have been a bitter pill to swallow in America, too. But abroad, there was no one to guide me through the dark times. I used to hide the cracks in my relationship from my friends and family back home. So, it took me weeks to work up the courage to break the news to my nearest and dearest because I was too embarrassed to admit what had happened. In fact, when I went home to America a year later, some people still hadn’t gotten the message and asked me how the ex was doing.
In the days when the breakup was fresh, I was a complete mess. I started to drink a bottle of wine every night, cry, and feel completely alone in the world. I would think about calling someone in the U.S., like my Mom, but use the time difference as an excuse not to. I imagined my Grandmother telling me, “I knew you shouldn’t have moved to Russia. Come back home.” In the mornings, I would wake up slightly red-eyed and go to work like a completely normal person. Until I could go home and do it all over.
Then one night, I hit rock bottom in a drag club.
Let me back up. I was settling in for another evening with my bottle of wine and self-pity for dinner when my two friends showed up unannounced. “It’s time to stop wallowing. Come out with us. You need to get over him!” was the gist of the conversation. So I put on a short skirt and headed into the Moscow night scene with my friends. Hopping from bar to bar, I drank way too much and I was way drunker than I’ve ever been in public before.
A friend called us a taxi to go to a drag club, which I had no idea existed in Moscow. When we arrived, I remember watching the dancers on stage, enthralled, for only a couple of minutes before the club started to sway before my eyes. After purging my gut of alcohol in the bathroom, I pulled out my phone to call an Uber with fumbling fingers. Vision blurred, I teetered out of the club without saying goodbye to anyone. In front of the club, a driver waved his hand at me and I managed to pour myself into his car, praying I wouldn’t puke again. Thank God for modern technology, right?
The driver took off and was silent for a moment. “So, what is your address?” he asked me. I tried to focus my vision on his face. “What do you mean. You’re not my Uber driver?” I looked around the car. The interior was very fancy, too fancy to be an Uber driver. I started bawling. I mean ugly crying and begging the driver to take me back to the club. “Shh, it’s okay, it’s okay” he assured me, which is exactly what a rapist or serial killer would say in that exact situation. “What’s your name?”
“M-melissa” I choked out, crying even harder at his reassurances. He started patting my hair and saying “Melissa, it’s going to be okay, just tell me where you live, it’s going to be okay.”
My actions had been drunk and reckless. I didn’t know what to do. I had read not long before this night how some young foreign boy died after being robbed and abandoned by a gypsy cab in Moscow. Was I going to roll myself out of this car? With no other option, I told the stranger my address. Praise be to God, that man delivered me home safely as promised. I think of this kind stranger as my Moscow Angel.
When I woke up the next day, my stomach turned from the thought of all of the possibilities of what could have happened. My phone was full of messages from my friends asking if I was okay and where I had disappeared to. Nothing was okay with my behavior the night before. I was treating myself badly in the place of the person who treated me badly. At that moment, I decided it was time to stop punishing myself for the failure of my breakup and to start taking care of myself again.
It took a wine-soaked month, but breaking up shook me from my stupor. I suddenly realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
My new-found clarity opened my eyes to how discontent I was with my life. I finally called my Mom and told her the truth about my ex. I started to examine my job, my city, and my happiness. After snipping the relationship strings, I was unencumbered and independent for the first time in years! It felt like the world was full of possibilities. Suddenly, I could go anywhere or do anything. I just needed to have a real conversation with myself about what goals I wanted to set and achieve them. And I did! Fast forward six months and I had moved countries and gone back to school for a Master’s degree in my field of work.
Although I wouldn’t say my relationship ended so much as it exploded, the impact of the blow landed me in a much better place both physically and mentally. The shrapnel scars will stick with me, but not in a bad way. They are a reminder of what I’ve been through and what I can overcome.
Break-ups abroad can leave you stranded, lonely, isolated, homeless, broke, or deported. Each situation is different, but they’re usually pretty tough. Still, they’re no different from other breakups in the sense that you can and will pick yourself up and carry on.
Through my experience, I learned how to simultaneously be more independent and more vulnerable with my loved ones. I also learned how to do a better job of communicating with my friends and family from a distance.
