Cheshire Karen

Just wanted to post as I feel incredibly sad as my relationships with my UK friendships are changing and I am quite naturally getting closer to my newly made Oz friends.

Spoke with one of my UK pals last night and found that both her girls had been in a serious way in hospital all of last week and I didn't know as she didn't want to worry me and none of our other pals let me know. If I'd been in the UK, I would have been right by her side helping her out and well just being there. I also feel slightly annoyed that nobody let me know (out of sight and all that)

I also realise that when I speak to my UK pals, the subject matter has changed as the minutia of everyday life doesn't mean much to them as they don't live it.

All totally natural and my UK pals are still close mates but I think its an acknowledgement on my part that I live a different life to them now and we have severed that link as it were. I think I'm grieving that everyday closeness with them.

As it is very likely we will go home at some point (long story - hubby very unhappy) I am really nervous that those friendships will not regain strength. I put in a lot of footwork in getting to know people here and its beginning to pay off. Consequently, I have lots of pals and am very social here now. If I go back I will have to work and will rely on my old pals a lot more.

Anyone else got similar experiences?

Mummy in the foothills

Awww don't feel too bad, it happens to us all I think.
But whats really good, when I've gone back (once for a year and on holidays too) my friends and I just fall back into our friendships like we'd never been apart.
The girls I lived with in Nursing school only stay in contact at Christmas and major events, births deaths etc. We are all separated now, one in UK one in New Jersey and me in CA. Yet we see each other and five minutes it's back to normal chit chat and wonderful.
I hope it's the same way for you too.

koalakim

Hi there

Friendships are bound to change when you move away. Everyone is always so busy these days that things do slip and you really have to work hard at maintaining those friendships - if you want to keep them.

So far we've done pretty well and on our trips back to the UK everyone is keen to see us. However, we suddenly get a busy week and think OMG haven't called/emailed so and so. Having said that true friends will always be there and you'll pick up where you left off even if it was years ago.

I think that is the difference I found when I went back recently, with my old friends it was just all soooo easy - because we have history and it is hard getting close friendships here when you first start. In the UK you have your school mates, work mates you pick up people as life goes by but here you suddenly have to have friends and sometimes you don't realise how long that took in the UK!

I've had quite a few friends live abroad (partly because of hubbys work) before we moved away and some said that they had lost who they thought were close friends because there was this divide that someone has gone off and lived abroad - actually done it. Most people do dream of what we've done but many never have the guts to do it or it's not so easy and there may be a wee bit of the old green eyed monster in there.

It is also hard when someone so far away is having a rough spot, one of my friends has been through it recently and you feel guilty for not being there other than a good old chinwag on the phone.

Be prepared to accept it will alter because as you say you are both experiencing different aspects of life now but be interested in their day to day lives as they are in yours. Keep it going as best as you can - thank goodness communication is so easy now (when my friends lived in Cayman it was £25.00 for a 30min phone call) and then if they are good friends you should pick up easily when you go back.

Good luck!

Kim

quoll

I wouldnt worry too much about it. I dont communicate much with my very long term friends in UK - we are all notoriously bad communicators especially as I now dont write and they dont email (or write, half of them!!!). BUT as soon as I get home, we are on the phone or visiting and within minutes of getting in through the door we talk as if there had never been the intervening years/aeons between us. We do a sort of global catch up and then right back on track. I dont feel dissed because they dont keep me up with the minutiae of their lives and similarly I dont think they do either. If I get around to it, I send them a Christmas letter and love to get theirs in return but sometimes we are all too busy. In lots of ways I am glad of that because constant communication without being able to share over coffee would make me even more depressed about being stuck here than I already am - I cant go to my friend's daughter's wedding, I cant see their babies, I cant see their grandkids, I cant have lunch with them in town or go to a movie with them - I think of all that I am missing and that is far more upsetting for me than just getting on with my stuff and letting them get on with theirs.

I have had Aussie friends but they have all been far more transient - when my kids were little I had friends who had little kids but they went their ways and I went mine and nothing stuck quite as well as those friendships made in the developmental years. Similarly - work friends, yup, got one or two that I still count as friends but I moved out of that work place and they have come and gone and they havent stuck either.

As far as letting people back home know - I am guilty of hiding a lot as well. My granddaughter is very sick in hospital at the moment with whooping cough, but I havent told the aged rellies because it would worry them and they would be able to do nothing about it but worry. They do the same to me too so it's mutually protective.

Cheshire Karen

Thanks everyone for your kind words of support.

Its chuffing hard isn't it. Just thought I'd add that I have made several pals but not one of them an Aussie! All expats, although not all brits. Something about shared experiences me thinks.



I know Quoll said somewhere that once you've left your native land, it is so easy to then never truly feel settled anywhere. I so relate to that.

Nu-Shooz

Ditto to that.

Also i feel that while we are living elsewhere, it is US that change and not friends/family or the UK.
I had this discussion with my kids over the weekend. While we live here in OZ and miss our old life-style, when we do eventually go back we are expecting things to be the same as before, but it won't be cause we will have changed without realising. That's what knocks you for six. But we are prepared!
Anyway, why should they change for us, we are the ones who left.

northernbird

You are absolutely right. You won't realise just how much you have all changed until you start living there again.

islandergirl

The funny thing is when you emigrate it is sometimes the people that you think will stick with you as friends that don't and others surprise you by making more of an effort.

My two longest term friends have been in my life since we were all about 5, and when I catch up with them it's like I was never away