Complex Relationships with Place
Relationships are complicated. Our emotions and experiences and interactions are complex. We have a broad and deep vocabulary to help us describe different kinds of relationships we experience – especially the range of romantic relationships.
We talk of love at first sight, falling in love, falling out of love, unrequited love. There are flings, whirlwind romances, friends with benefits, long-distance relationships, polyamorous relationships. There are even toxic relationships, loveless marriages, and affairs. There are commitments without weddings, and even weddings without much commitment. There are first dates, anniversaries, and break ups.
This rich vocabulary we use to describe relationships between people can be used to better express our multi-layered connections to places.
When you think of someone you love, feelings arise. It might be warmth, happiness, joy, gratitude. You might find yourself smiling. But then again, maybe you haven’t seen or even talked to them for a while. Perhaps you fought recently. Maybe you’re missing them.
What about someone you used to be close to a long time ago, but haven’t talked to in years? Thinking of them still might bring a smile to your lips. There might also be sadness over losing touch with them, or perhaps nostalgia for a part of your life now in the past.
When we think of loved ones who live far away, that smile might still be there, but it can also be painful. Pain at the geography that separates you, guilt over choices you’ve made that keep you apart, or resentment at choices others have made.
Our relationships with people are complicated: multi-layered and complex. So are our relationships with places. The reality is that we DO have relationships with places - emotional and legal relationships. When we allow ourselves to apply the vocabulary of love and human relationships to describe our relationships with place, we gain the ability to describe complex emotions and articulate multi-layered connections. This opens the door to increased clarity and comfort.
I’m certainly not the first person to draw this connection. Amy Medina wrote that living in a country where she is not (and cannot be) a citizen is like falling in love “with something that I can’t keep.” Mariam Ottimofiore wrote something similar in her “break up letter” to Dubai – that living there was like falling in love with someone not looking for commitment. As she put it: “Nothing serious, please.” Dana Saxon described "falling out of love" with a place.
These globally mobile individuals helped give words to something I have heard from so many TCKs over the years. Last week I wrote about unrequited love of place - feeling a deep emotional connection to a country in which you have no legal rights: no guarantee you can stay, and no right to return.
Many expats and TCKs have told me that my discussions around unrequited love of place gave them words to express how they feel for the first time. They passed my blog posts on to friends and family, to help them understand an experience they’d never been able to explain before. THIS is what the language of love gives us: a way to articulate and SHARE the emotions we feel about places.
“Unrequited love” describes one type of relationship to place, but there is an endless variety of ways to apply this concept.
For example, have you experienced “love at first sight” with a place? You arrive for the first time and something about that city, that country, speaks to your soul in a way you can’t intellectually explain. That was Bangkok for me, on one of my visits.
Have you experienced the slow burn of falling in love with a place gradually over time, as its idiosyncrasies become familiar and comforting, and you become fond of its foibles?
Have you had a fling, or a holiday romance? A short and intense experience of a country that becomes a fond memory, but not a long term commitment.
Have you had a long-distance relationship with a place? Somewhere very close to your heart, often in your thoughts, but not where you live right now? Have you experienced managing that distance, through visits and finding ways of connecting from far away?
Have you experienced the sting of rejection, when a place you love does not return your desire for commitment? A visa renewal or citizenship application rejected?
Have you experienced the slow loss of love, as you change, and the place you loved changes? The relationship you have changes and you fall out of love.
Perhaps living in a country you don’t love, don’t feel that emotional connection to, could be compared to a loveless marriage, an every day loneliness due to lack of love for a place you are committed to.
Have you experienced a casual relationship with a place – you regularly visit and enjoy it, but there’s no commitment on either side. Friends with benefits, perhaps? That might be a good summary of my long-term but fairly largely uncommitted relationship with Cambodia!
The complicated love of holding multiple passports might compare to a polyamorous relationship – you can be committed to more than one place, just as you can be committed to more than one person, but that doesn’t mean everyone understands just how you make it work.
We connect deeply with places in which we live. We bond with places we visit.
But, as facebook might say, it’s complicated.
The language of love is powerful, and commandeering this language to describe our relationships with places gives us a powerful tool to explore identities that don’t fit into simple geographical boxes. We can use it to explore our connections to multiple countries, in the same ways that we have multiple important relationships in our lives, whether or not they are categorised as romantic relationships, as concurrent or simultaneous.
I encourage you to have a go at this. Make a list of places (countries, cities or other places) you’ve lived in, and/or visited. How would you describe your relationship with each place, using the language of love and human relationships? How have these relationships evolved over time? Another good exercise is writing a love letter to each place - this might be a letter to a current lover, a break-up letter, a nostalgic letter looking back on a lost love or perhaps a first love from a long time ago. Pick something that fits your situation - be creative!
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An earlier version of this post appeared on misunderstood-book.com
