Emigration and Navigating Long-distance Relationships

As many people continue to leave the country to seek overseas work opportunities, emigration and navigating long-distance relationships is a relevant topic. While moving to another country and taking advantage of economic opportunities is exciting, relocating involves leaving friends and family behind. It also requires reinventing yourself, which can impact your relationships and mental health.

This article focuses on voluntary emigration, navigating long-distance relationships, and the potential impact on mental health. It also applies to those with friends and family who live far away and might need support to help build and maintain relationships at a distance. This post offers insight into how emigration can affect your relationships and shares some ideas for maintaining connection. 

How emigration can affect relationships and mental health

While moving and relocating to a different country is nothing new, our society’s global connectedness has opened up myriad opportunities for people to travel and work in other places. 

However, moving and adapting to an utterly different environment presents challenges. Emigration involves lots of paperwork and navigating various bureaucratic obstacles. It can also involve substantial investments that can pressure one’s financial situation. It doesn’t always need to be a negative experience, but administrative tasks can add more stress to moving—especially when things do not go according to plan!

Emigrating to reunite with friends and family might be a different experience than moving somewhere where you don’t know anyone or have no existing social connections. However, nurturing relationships – old and new – caring for your mental health and building emotional resilience can help you manage the process. 

The profound challenges of emigration

In a Daily Maverick article titled “The profound challenges of emigration: Insights from South African families,” Dr. Sulette Ferreira discusses how this process affects family relationships, including the relationships between parents and their children who have decided to emigrate. 

Ferreira shares three perspectives on the impact of distance on maintaining faraway relationships. According to a research paper by Shafer and Sun (2022), these perspectives include “the end of distance,” “the insurmountable distance,” and “the contingency of distance.” Let’s examine each perspective in turn.

The end of distance

The end of distance refers to the fact that thanks to technology, distance isn’t significant in determining how we connect with others. Smartphones and video technology make communicating with loved ones far away easier. Scheduling time to chat and catch up is now as simple as sending a message, as opposed to expensive long-distance phone calls or archaic letters and postcards. 

The insurmountable distance

The second viewpoint is that geographical distance can hinder the development of close relationships as there is a lack of face-to-face contact. While connecting virtually is easier than ever, building close ties online may be more challenging than in-person. Spending time with someone in person is a valuable element of relationship building that may be lost if you never see each other. 

The contingency of distance

The third viewpoint is ambivalent, suggesting it entirely depends on the relationship. While connections will undoubtedly change over time and distance, it doesn’t mean we can’t adapt and continue to nurture relationships differently. Friends and family worldwide likely use a combination of virtual catch-ups and in-person visits. People may manage this process differently, depending on their needs and resources. 

With these three perspectives in mind, we can better understand what is important to us when managing our long-distance relationships. While everyone will resonate differently with these three perspectives, they can provide some context for navigating fragmented family dynamics. It is essential to be flexible and adaptable and to openly communicate your wants and needs in a long-distance relationship, as in any relationship. In all three contexts, what is consistent is that sustaining relationships requires time and attention. 

Learn more about relationships and mental health at SACAP Global

If you’re looking for practical tools for navigating relationships, SACAP Global offers a range of short online courses that can help you navigate transitions and complex relationship dynamics. 

These courses include:

• Enhancing Mental Health: Stressful transitions can impact our mental health. Finding ways to manage anxiety, depression and our overall wellbeing is essential. 
• Dealing with Grief and Loss: While you might not be physically losing people close to you, friends and family emigrating can feel like a profound loss, especially when they are moving very far away. Learning practical and compassionate ways to manage grief and loss can help navigate these changes. 
• Effective Interpersonal Communication: We might take for granted that we know how to communicate with our friends and family. However, when negotiating long distances, time zones, and competing priorities, we can benefit from honing our basic communication skills. 
• Dynamics of Interpersonal Communication: Relationships and Conflict Management: Friends and family moving abroad can significantly change family dynamics. Practical relationship management tools can help navigate conflict and maintain harmonious relationships. 

For more information about our other related offerings, browse our course list. 

Note: It’s important to clarify that voluntary emigration and forced migration are very different. Forced migration and fleeing your country due to political turmoil has a psychological impact beyond this article’s scope and requires specialised counselling and social support.