“I miss Greece.”
It is perhaps the most common phrase you hear from people living abroad. But when the conversation goes a little further, something different often emerges.
It is not only a place they miss.
They miss a particular way of existing within relationships.
The friend who would call on impulse. The family that met up without needing to be scheduled weeks ahead. The colleague who would say after work, “shall we grab a coffee?”. The people who knew their story without their having to tell it again from the beginning every time.
What is missing, very often, is not the homeland. It is everyday intimacy in relationships — something we perhaps do not recognise enough while we are living it.
Loneliness abroad is often invisible
A person can have a successful career, financial security, a beautiful place to live — and at the same time experience a deep sense of isolation.
The international literature shows that loneliness is one of the most common yet least discussed difficulties for people who move to another country. It is not only about a lack of social contacts, but above all about the absence of meaningful, stable relationships that create a sense of belonging (Fan, Zhu & Shaffer, 2025).
This is why many people say:
“I’ve met plenty of people, but I don’t feel I have people.”
This distinction matters.
Social networking is not the same as emotional closeness.
The intimacy deficit
In psychotherapy we often meet people who struggle to describe exactly what is happening to them.
They do not necessarily feel depressed.
They do not necessarily want to go back to Greece.
And yet there is a persistent sense that something is missing. As though life were working normally, but a part of its aliveness had been lost. A difficulty in feeling real fullness, intimacy or psychological rest; a diffuse sense of emptiness, of dissatisfaction, even when everything appears to be going well. We might call it an intimacy deficit.
Not because it is an official psychological term, but because it aptly describes an experience: the absence of those small everyday interactions through which a person feels that they exist alongside others.
Most of us do not realise how important these moments are until they are gone. And that is because relationships do not only meet emotional needs. They actively take part in the way we organise and regulate our daily experience.
It is not only our thoughts that regulate us. Our relationships regulate us too.
Contemporary psychology now knows that emotional regulation is not an exclusively individual matter.
From infancy through to adult life, our nervous system is continually influenced by the presence of other people.
A gaze that recognises us and makes us feel less of a stranger among strangers.
A familiar voice.
A spontaneous encounter.
The sense that someone holds us in mind. Even if it is the barista who remembers how we take our coffee, or the person at the bakery who recognises us.
These experiences work as an invisible network of psychological recognition and support.
When we move to another country, this network does not disappear only geographically. It is also interrupted as an everyday experience.
Why technology is not enough
Many people are in touch with their loved ones every day through video calls.
This is of course helpful.
But it does not replace a shared daily life.
It cannot replace spontaneous moments, physical presence, being together with no particular purpose.
The relationship goes on existing.
But the shared life has changed.
This is why many people describe a paradox:
“I talk to everyone almost every day, but I feel alone.”
This is not a contradiction.
We human beings need not only communication but shared experience.
Loneliness does not mean you have failed to adapt
There is one more myth.
That if, after a year or two abroad, you still feel lonely, then “you must be doing something wrong”.
In reality, research shows that loneliness and homesickness are very common experiences of migration and can affect both psychological and physical wellbeing — even in people who otherwise function very effectively at work and in daily life (Stroebe et al., 2015).
Adapting to a new country is not only practical. It is also deeply relational. It takes time for a place to acquire faces and a feeling of familiarity.
When living abroad awakens older experiences
For some people, migration brings to the surface not only the loneliness of the present.
It also activates older experiences.
If someone grew up feeling that they had to manage on their own, or that it was hard to rely on others, moving away from a familiar environment can make those experiences even more intense.
Living abroad, in this sense, throws light on a difficulty that was already there.
Psychotherapy does not replace people, nor can it fill the gap left by a community or substitute for friends and family.
But it can offer something equally important.
A space where the experience of loneliness does not have to be carried in silence.
Within the therapeutic relationship, a person can understand more deeply what they are really missing, recognise their needs for connection without treating them as weakness, and gradually begin to create new ways of relating to the place where they live.
Because in the end, adapting to a new country does not only mean learning a new language or organising a new life.
It means being able, slowly and at your own pace, to feel that you belong somewhere again.
The sense of “home” is not created by a place alone. It is created through the relationships in which we can be seen and emotionally present.
References:
Fan, S. X., Zhu, F., & Shaffer, M. A. (2025). Missed connections: A resource-management theory to combat loneliness experienced by globally mobile employees. Journal of International Business Studies, 56, 230–243. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41267-023-00658-3
Stroebe, M., Schut, H., & Nauta, M. (2015). Homesickness: A systematic review of the scientific literature. Review of General Psychology, 19(2), 157–171. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000037
