Settling In
Going home for two weeks is a visit, and you are the guest
A trip back is imagined as a rest and usually turns out to be a schedule of obligations conducted in somebody else’s spare room, which surprises people every single time.
By Arjun Nair3 min read
The visit that is planned and the visit that happens
The version imagined in advance is restful: familiar streets, people who know you, food you miss, a fortnight without effort. The version that occurs is a tightly packed circuit of appointments in which you sleep in three different places and see thirty people for ninety minutes each.
The mechanism is arithmetic rather than anybody’s fault. A year of accumulated relationships has to be discharged in a fixed number of days, everybody wants a proper conversation, and the geography of a scattered family means a great deal of the time goes on travel.
Recognising this in advance changes what you plan. A visit is a piece of work with an emotional component, and treating it as a holiday guarantees disappointment at the end of it.
You are staying in somebody else’s life
Without a home of your own in the country, you are a guest for the duration, which is a specific condition. There is no door to close, no routine, no space that is yours, and a persistent low-level obligation to be sociable at all times.
It also puts your hosts under strain, however welcome they made you feel. A spare room occupied for two weeks reorganises a household, and the difference between a lovely visit and a slightly tense one is often just its length.
The people who find these trips easiest tend to do something about this: shorter stays in each place, a hotel or a rented flat for part of it where the budget allows, or a base of their own with visits out from it. It feels less warm and it protects the warmth.
Everybody expects the person who left
A subtler difficulty is that the version of you people are pleased to see is largely the one from before. Conversations resume where they stopped, old roles reassert themselves within a family with remarkable speed, and the years that changed you are compressed into a question at the beginning of the meal.
That question is usually some form of asking how it is going, and it does not want a real answer. It is a courtesy, and the honest reply is too long. Most people develop a short version and are quietly frustrated by having to use it.
The disappointment on the other side is real too. People at home would like to hear about your life and lack the reference points to receive it, and a description of an unfamiliar bureaucracy or a friend they will never meet does not travel well. It is nobody’s fault and it is a genuine loss.
The uncomfortable discovery about the place itself
Somewhere around the second or third visit, most people notice something they were not expecting: home has become slightly foreign. Prices have moved, shops have changed, the news is about things you did not follow, and a set of small assumptions no longer sit quite right.
This produces a particular disorientation, because you are supposed to be the one person in the room who belongs. Being a stranger in the place you are from is stranger than being a stranger abroad, where the condition is at least expected.
It also cuts the other way. People notice that you have picked up habits, opinions or an accent, and comment on it, and some of the comments have an edge. Being told you have changed is rarely offered as a compliment.
How to make the trip work better
The suggestions that come up repeatedly are simple. Go for longer than feels efficient if you can, so that some of it is ordinary rather than ceremonial. See fewer people properly rather than everybody briefly. Build in at least a few empty days, ideally at the end.
Do at least one dull thing on purpose: a supermarket, a walk you used to take, an afternoon with nothing arranged. The ordinary hours are what actually restore the connection, and they are the first casualty of a packed schedule.
And separate this trip from any question about whether to move back, because a visit is a terrible sample and an emotionally loaded one. Two weeks of being pleased to see people, with nobody working, no ordinary Tuesday in it and every meal treated as an occasion, tells you almost nothing about what living there would actually be like. People make large decisions on the strength of a good fortnight, and they regret them at about the rate you would expect.
Common questions
How long should a trip home be?
Longer than the minimum if you can manage it, because the value is in the ordinary hours rather than the arranged ones and those are the first to be squeezed out. Many people find that anything under a week is entirely ceremonial.
Should I stay with family or find my own place?
Staying with family is warmer and puts both sides under strain over a long visit, so a mixture often works best. A base of your own for part of the trip preserves the goodwill that a fortnight in a spare room can erode.
Is a visit a good way to decide whether to move back?
No. A holiday version of a place, with everybody pleased to see you and nobody at work, is not a sample of living there. Any serious decision about returning needs a longer and duller look than a visit provides.
Consumer editor, Globetrotter Talks
Arjun writes the explanatory pieces on arriving, visas & paperwork, money abroad and is unreasonably interested in the detail nobody else checks.
