kerry s

I moved to the US with my teenager to marry a US citizen. That's all good, the kids in school for another year and plans to go back to the UK for university and i love my husband and all should be well.....except after being in Wisconsin for three years i couldn't tell you one thing i prefer about it over the UK, there is no up side to the US and i find it all very depressing, I'm DESPERATE, desperate to go back home. My husband is in poor health and i wouldn't think of leaving him and i'm pretty much stuck here until the kid goes back for uni anyway so i have a year to figure all this out. Does anyone else feel this way?

ddsrph

Its Wisconsin. I spent four miserable years attending Marquette Dental school in Milwaukee. Nothing more depressing than months of below zero temperatures. It’s made even worse listening to the locals telling you how they love Wisconsin weather. I guess moving further south is not an option.

neill

Lots do, and January in Wisconsin is probably one of the worst places to be in the US, especially if you didn't grow up in it. Is your husband open to moving further south?

kerry s

Thank you for your reply. Yes, we have been discussing just that. My husband is self employed so it would mean selling up and completely starting again which i'm pushing for because i think it's his business that's making him ill. My dilemma is, if we did move and i still ended up feeling the same way? I have to figure out if it is just Wisconsin or the US its self. It's a big question because i may just be blinded by home sickness. Yes i agree with you about Wisconsin! I'm right out in the sicks, nothing but farms and miles and miles of nothing. Before i moved here, because i work from home i thought it would mean i'd get more work done but it's way more oppressive than i thought it would be and people here do actually like six months of winter! Crazy.

neill

Sounds also like you need to be in a bigger town, so you can make some more connections. That would help no end.

Lion in Winter

Small-town America is a giant culture shock, no two ways about it. I once spent three months in the Neenah-Appleton-Menasha area (after growing up in London ) and I might as well have been on Mars. So I'm sure that doesn't help. You might have less culture shock in New York, or Boston. Southern cities are a different culture yet again, but warmer at least.

A year isn't a long time really and you would probably find that you need that to organize an international move, employment, etc. Worth finding out/ensuring you can meet the income requirements to bring your US husband and all that. Ask for the "returning to the UK" part of the forum, I'm an unreliable source of useful information on these things.

Can you at least travel to/visit another part of the States to see if that changes the way you feel at all?

ddsrph

What kind of business does your husband have? Would it be something he could do in different state? It would be very helpful to head south for a few days just to get away and while there consider the possibility of a future move.

Pulaski

Please could you share some examples of what you are having problems with, because if someone truly can't find anything positive to say about the place where they live, wherever that is on earth, it sounds more like depression than a problem with where they are living.

scrubbedexpat099

Never been there but have friends who live there, admittedly they sound like the cast of Fargo and are likely attuned to it.

When it goes bad here I go out for a beer. 29F so good, wind howling bad, snowing bad so beer time.

robin1234

I can definitely sympathise. My home in the US is the New York north country - so similar climate to Wisconsin, and the environment is miles and miles of poor quality farmland, houses that either fell down fifty years ago or are currently in the slow process of falling down, and the occasional Walmart or trailer park. People born & bred there don’t know any different so they’re quite content. This was quite ok when my wife & I both had professional jobs, but when we retired we bought a small place in England and I spend 6 or 7 months a year there (here.)

Anyway, one of the things I find making the idiocy of rural life bearable is regular visits to a city. When in NYS, we spend a night or two in our nearest big city, Burlington, VT, once a month or so. Nothing special, it’s just dinner out in a nice French restaurant, walking the city streets, a bit of shopping that ISN’T Tractor Supply or Walmart. (Now, nothing against those two stores, it’s just that there should be more to life.)

Could you easily reach Chicago, by train, for instance? It really is one of the world’s great cities. We spent a week there last February, the hotels were spectacularly cheap in the dead of winter. You can spend a week just in the Art Institute. Or there’s opera, shows, movies, restaurants...

civilservant

I agree with this - finding joy in absolutely nothing sounds like clinical depression.

Lion in Winter

Small town Wisconsin. If you come from a UK city or anywhere even within striking distance of a UK town the culture shock is giant and can easily induce symptoms that either mimic or are a depression. All of a sudden, everything you ever knew about people, interactions, and daily life is quite, quite different but they speak the same language so it's even more discombobulating. You think they should understand you, but they don't, and you don't understand them.

Pulaski

That's about the same as how I describe small town NC. Everything is different from what I was used to, to varying degrees, and the language is subtly different too. It's like waking up in a parallel universe, where everything is only somewhat familiar. The difference, for me at least, was that this was "home" from the moment I arrived (I had no plans to return to the UK), and I was determined to make it work, rather than stress about the differences.

Lion in Winter

Yes, different personalities and different personal circumstances can make a difference for sure. We all have to deal with what we have in front of us and how things actually are.

scrubbedexpat099

And a big chunk of Colorado.