After living in the USA for 8 months with my American husband, the UK never looked so beautiful to me as the day I returned.
Although the time away didn't fare so well on my close friendships I didn't care.
My husband of course misses his family but as a working class couple, the joint job we have here in the UK as a hospitality management couple is everything we could dream of! We are able to save £1000 a month instead of barely being able to scrape together our rent and bill money and having to eat out at Taco Bell or McDonald's dollar menu because groceries are more expensive than fast food!
I love the UK and it will always be my home, regardless of whether we stay here or do end up in the states in the future.

To the OP - I'm about to move back to the UK after 15 years in the US. As an actress I have already prepared a 3 minute monologue on why we moved back.....!!! Thought I should be prepared just in case!!! HAHAHA!!!

Although I have found that when people on both sides of the pond say to me "Why would you leave LA?!?!" the minute I say "Family" it shuts them all up really quickly and they totally get it.

Good luck!

To OP Debs1966
I had some uncontrollable, unexplainable dark moods in the first months back after 18 quite happy yrs in US..
Weird, because I knew I should have been happy to be comfortably back but I felt totally alien here. I struggled with culture and behavior of people, and am still not entirely comfortable with society in general. Sure, I have met plenty of pleasant people but I see a lot of of people & behavior that I do not fit with.
Twenty months on and most of the time I feel OK with being here. Overjoyed and thrilled no, but OK yes.

I think it boils down to the fact that if you're not so well off wage wise, you will most definitely be better off in the UK as the USA is no place to be struggling. I also find groceries (proper food) more expensive over here. If you are earning a good living, you're less likely to notice these things.

Good morning

This is an interesting topic that speaks a lot to me as I have been in similar situations at various stages of my life.

I have travelled and lived abroad for most of the past 20 years in places as diverse as New Zealand, Australia and Canada and of course the UK.

I have always embraced the culture, history and traditions of the countries in which I live in and do not aim at recreating a French environment or lifestyle when I am abroad.

I loved New Zealand so much that my Friends and Family thought I would settle there but I strongly believe that one belongs somewhere and the older one gets the more obvious it becomes.

Allow yourself enough time to honestly reflect on the present situation with a sense of perspective.

If I may say so, trust your Friends to be happy for you and to see you whether you pop in within a few days or few weeks of your return as this is what real Friends are for.

I have learned a few lessons in my life and one of these is to allow the ones who stayed behind to entertain us with their stories just like us travellers are speaking about far away places.

I often found out that people who are not travelling much often have unrealistic visions of countries abroad just like we tend to fantasize about our own country when we don't live in it.

I believed for a long time that jetting off all the time and living abroad was a thrill but I learned over the years that one needs real foundations to build a life and that we are all hit one day or the other with the dillemma of where shall I setlle and finally drop my luggage?

You are very lucky indeed to still have faithful Friends waiting for you home and those are to be cherished.

I wish you the very best!

Karim

Karim, love your 'postcards' and as for this post, well I couldn't have put it better myself. Bravo!

I`m reviving this thread because I`m going through a big bout of reverse culture shock. I`m very much an "inbetweenie" at the moment because our US furniture was only packed up two days ago, and I`m in the house with borrowed furniture.
I can only describe the feeling as 'not quite landed yet'. I`m kind of hovering in an inbetween place. Cant quite believe I can go out and buy all those things (food mainly) I`ve been missing. It helps that its summer and so is lovely anyway.
Anybody got any tips for surviving this phase?
I`m desperately grateful to be back in the UK, but slightly out of sorts at the same time.

I didn't have that feeling coming back as you know, but I do have a similar experience that might help.

We once bought a house in Toronto and on moving day, my husband was away on business. After the movers had left and I was alone in the new house, I realized it didn't feel at all like home and I wasn't happy there.

I called my best friend in tears and he told me that the best thing to do was to start working on the house, to make it feel more like my own home. So I did - I started stripping paint off badly painted doors and I decorated a few rooms and he was right - it helped although it was a gradual process.

Which is a long-winded way of saying I think you have to find ways to "bed back in" to the community. Work at fitting back in, start building experiences here, renew old friendships and make new connections, take classes or go to local meetings (WI?) and slowly but surely you will start to feel more at home.

Let's pick a date for that coffee - I will PM you.

Good post and replies as this is something i know my husband is really worried about - when visiting the uk it always takes time for my eyes and ears to adapt - even a British accent seems out of place.
We have also moved on with our lives and even though we have family in the uk we will not be living near to them and we have no friends as such to go back to (billy no mates) .. we have a different lifestyle now...

the main thing that bothers me about going back is that we are going to have to rent - which is expensive and the propertys are so much smaller with all those small rooms Eeek! so hoping we dont get clausterphobia (sp)

another thing is the kids - they are 16, 14 and 10 and they have wonderful friends here, the eldest is driving - and they are plugged into an amazing church here... so thats going to be the biggest adjustment - .. scary

Pick up tourist guides for your area even if you know it, and see all the best places through the eyes of a visitor.

This helped me when I was seeing all the worst aspects of my local town.

For a while here I felt as if I was treading water, not fitting in, and I still feel the same somewhat but less so now. I accept that my life experiences are different to those around me and I do not now expect to fit in entirely but remain an individual living amongst the locals. That's how we approached living in USA and is the way I feel I must approach this new foreign country called UK.

1. British Accent - I know what you mean, I stepped off the plane in the UK in March after having not been there for years and while sipping a Mocha at Costa Coffee my ears were going nuts hearing British accents everywhere. It was a surreal experience.

2. Plugged into an amazing church - That could be troublesome, religion in the UK has declined that it can't match what the US offers on that front. I know because I am part of a great church here in the US that I know would be hard to replace in the UK.

Just take it really slowly. Unlike when you are on holidays back, you don't have to cram everything and everyone (eg fantastic supermarket choices) in at once. There is no rush.
Coming back from NZ, I spent several days just getting over jetlag and being waited on by Mum lol. I still haven't trawled clothing in M&S even though it is my favourite shop - I have now done the food though.

I am in limbo in that there will have been 3 different temporary accommodations plus hotels before we finally get to unpack the container into a new house in September sometime. So real life is on hold till September at least by just going with the flow, it is actually quite interesting to not be stuck in one place immediately. Don't get me wrong though, we made very quick decisions about schools/ housing based on location of OH's office, but they won't form our reality immediately.
Good luck.