living in long-term limbo

I feel as though I’ve been living in limbo for years.

Not in a way that looks obvious from the outside. From the outside, life has kept moving. Countries have changed, apartments have changed, jobs have started and ended, and each time there’s been something practical to focus on, something that needed sorting, arranging, packing, finding, signing, learning, adjusting to. There’s always something to do when you live abroad and life shifts again, and sometimes the doing keeps you from fully feeling what it’s doing to you.

Since moving to Switzerland in 2015, I don’t think I’ve ever felt truly secure for very long. For much of that time, Dennis has carried the main financial responsibility for our life together, which has meant that uncertainty around work has inevitably affected how secure our life has felt to me too. Even during periods when everything seemed settled from the outside, I often found myself waiting for something to change. Sometimes there were signs that things no longer felt quite as secure as they had at the beginning; other times it was simply my own awareness that so much of our financial stability depended on something that wasn't within my control. Over the years, I think I became accustomed to never quite trusting that the ground beneath us would stay still.

That’s a strange way to live. Because nothing may have happened yet, and still, something in you starts preparing. You hear the comments, notice the frustration, feel the energy around work change, and some part of you begins quietly bracing for another round of uncertainty. It doesn’t mean he’s wrong to feel what he feels, and it doesn’t mean those jobs or companies were easy to stay in. It simply means that over time, I learned that even stability could have a short shelf life. And because his work determines so much of where we can realistically live, my life starts to move around that.

That’s the part that’s difficult to say plainly without sounding unfair, because I understand the pressure he’s under. He needs to work so we can live. He needs to find roles that fit his skills, and because his work is specialised, those opportunities aren’t available everywhere. The choice of where we go is never just about what we fancy doing or where I’d like to be. It has to be where the work is. And that creates a very particular kind of dependency.

I left corporate work in 2011 because of my health, because Crohn’s disease and the stress of finance weren’t a good combination for me. I’d trained as a management accountant, and had worked in that world for years. Stepping away from it was not a light decision. It was something my body forced me to take seriously. Finance comes with deadlines, pressure, month-end, quarter-end, year-end, and even if the company changes, that underlying rhythm doesn’t.

After I left, I built my own business. I created my own way of working, my own income stream, my own something. And I’m proud of that, because it’s taken effort, persistence, and a lot of continuing when things didn’t look especially encouraging. The reality, though, is that my income has only really covered my own personal expenses. I don’t contribute to the family-level costs of life, the rent, the bills, the bigger financial responsibilities that keep everything afloat. So, my husband remains the breadwinner.

That word sits heavily, because it carries gratitude and guilt at the same time. I’m grateful he’s carried that responsibility. And I also feel guilty that he has had to. Underneath both of those is the uncomfortable truth that I cannot financially carry us if he loses his job.

That changes how free you feel. Technically, I can have preferences. I can say I like this place more than that place, that I don’t want to return to a certain country, that I would rather not move somewhere else again. In a practical sense, those preferences only carry so much weight when the real question is focused where he can get work. That’s the difference between having choices in theory and having choices that can actually shape your life.

Over time, that affects your voice. Not because anyone tells you to be quiet or because there’s some clear moment where your opinion is removed. It happens more subtly than that, through the repeated awareness that what you want may not be possible anyway. You begin to measure your words before you say them, to wonder whether there’s even any point voicing something that cannot realistically be prioritised. So, after a while, you stop saying certain things at all.

That’s the part that feels hardest to admit, because it sounds passive, and I don’t think of myself as passive. I have opinions. I have thoughts. I have a strong inner sense of what matters to me. Yet dependency has a way of changing how much space those things take up outside your own head.

It doesn’t happen suddenly. It happens through years of adapting, through moves you agree to because they make sense, through decisions that are necessary, through circumstances that leave very little room for what you would choose if money and work and location weren’t all tangled together. You adapt because you have to, because you love the person whose work is carrying your life, and because there’s no simple alternative sitting there waiting to be chosen.

Living abroad can intensify all of this. When you live near where you grew up, there may be other anchors around you, family, long-term friendships, familiar systems, a sense of place that exists outside the relationship. Abroad, especially when moves keep happening, so much of life can end up built around the relationship and the job that brought you there. If that job becomes unstable, the whole structure begins to feel unstable with it. And if you’re the person whose work is more portable, less financially reliable, or built around your own business, you can find yourself constantly adjusting around someone else’s career path.

That doesn’t mean your work doesn’t matter nor does it mean your life doesn’t matter. Practically speaking, though, when one income carries the household and the other doesn’t, the weight lands unevenly. And even when both people are kind, loving, and doing their best, the emotional effect of that unevenness still exists.

For me, it’s affected my confidence deeply. Years of not bringing in much money changes how you see yourself, even when you know your worth shouldn’t be measured by income. It’s one thing to know that in your head, it’s another thing to live for years with the reality that you cannot cover the life you are living. Confidence doesn’t always disappear in one obvious collapse. Sometimes it gets worn down through repetition, through every moment where you realise you need someone else’s income to keep going.

And then there is the pressure of watching him carry it. That matters too. Because this isn’t just about me feeling dependent. It’s also about knowing he has to find his next job, has to hold the practical reality of keeping us financially secure. I can feel the weight of that on him, I can feel my own guilt around it, and both things sit together in a way that doesn’t resolve neatly.

There’s gratitude there. However, there’s also loss. Then there’s appreciation for what my husband does, alongside the quiet ache of knowing my life bends around circumstances I don’t fully control. There’s understanding of why decisions have to be made the way they are, and yet there’s still sadness that my own preferences can feel secondary to practical necessity.

That’s the emotional complexity of long-term limbo. It isn’t about blame. It isn’t about one person being wrong and the other being right. It’s about what happens inside a life when stability keeps depending on something outside your control, and when the direction of your future is repeatedly tied to someone else’s employment.

You can still function inside that. You can still book appointments, run your business, cook dinner, answer messages, make plans, research apartments, fill in forms, and look perfectly capable from the outside. Women are often very good at continuing. Women living abroad are often especially good at continuing, because so much of life abroad requires competence even when you feel uncertain underneath it all.

Beneath the functioning, though, something can become tired. Not the kind of tiredness that comes from one bad week. More the tiredness of never quite being able to relax into a future because you don’t know how long that future will stay in place. The tiredness of rebuilding, then waiting, then sensing instability again, then bracing yourself before anything has even been confirmed.

That kind of limbo changes how you inhabit your own life. You begin holding things more loosely. You delay decisions. You hesitate before investing emotionally in a place, a routine, a friendship, a version of life that may need to be dismantled again. You might not even realise you’re doing it at first. It can feel like being sensible, practical, prepared.

And perhaps it is. However, it’s also a form of emotional shrinking. In the way your preferences start taking up less space. The way your confidence becomes quieter. The way you learn to organise yourself around uncertainty rather than desire. The way you stop asking yourself what you want because the more urgent question is what is possible. I think that’s why spaces outside the relationship can matter so much.

Sometimes 1-1 Support & Healing Sessions become a place where this kind of thing can be spoken honestly, without needing to protect anyone else from it and without turning it into blame. A place where the guilt, dependence, gratitude, frustration, tiredness, and loss of voice can all exist in the same conversation without anyone rushing to tidy them up.

That awareness can be uncomfortable. Because once you notice how much you’ve adapted, you can’t quite unsee it. You begin to recognise the moments where you soften your preference before you’ve even spoken it. You notice the small internal calculations around whether your needs are practical enough to mention. You feel the gap between the life you’re living and the parts of yourself that have become quieter inside it.

And still, the reality remains complicated. Because love is there. Gratitude is there. Practical necessity is there. The financial truth is there. His pressure is real. My dependence is real. The uncertainty is real. None of these cancel each other out. That’s what makes this kind of limbo so difficult to explain.

It isn’t a crisis you can point to cleanly. It’s an ongoing emotional climate, one you learn to live inside. It shapes decisions before they’re made, conversations before they begin, and confidence before you even realise it’s been affected.

And perhaps the hardest part is that you can understand all of it and still feel worn down by it. You can understand why your life needs to follow the work, why your partner carries pressure. You can understand why your own financial position limits what you can realistically insist on. You can understand every practical reason and still feel the quiet loss of not being able to fully steer your own future.

That’s the part many women living abroad may recognise. The life may look good. It may even be good in many ways. And still, somewhere underneath it, there can be a woman who feels less certain than she used to, less rooted, less able to say what she wants, because too many parts of her life have had to remain adjustable for too long.