From friendships to dating, those who moved countries as kids often think twice before letting others in. How does moving countries affect one’s emotional attachment?
“When things get hard, I want to run away.”
Ayah’s first heartbreak came when she had to say goodbye to her best friend before moving with her parents to Luxembourg. They had promised each other they would stay friends forever. She quickly learned never to make such a ludicrous promise again.
Now 22, Ayah is wildly social and deeply empathetic. She has collected more memories than long-term connections. It wasn’t that she was cold, far from it. But with goodbyes a constant companion in her life, Ayah learned to be realistic and slightly protective of her own heart, avoiding attachment to what she knew would be temporary.
“When things get hard, I want to run away. Okay, what’s a nice country I want to go to? … It makes me drop friends much easier because I think I would always make a new one … I don’t learn also to have a community and friends around you who are also like family, yeah, I think those are consequences.”
Ayah now has acquaintances across the globe, a perk of moving abroad often. She was born in Canada before she moved back to Egypt and left it just during the time of the Arab Spring to live in Luxembourg.
“I found it really hard to make friends because I was like, I don’t know how long I’m gonna even be here for, so what is the point, you know, I didn’t see the point in making friends.”
Ironically, for someone who dreaded the process, she was exceptionally good at making new friends. But the purpose of the connection resembled one coming from a playbook; a good and often temporary time rather than false promises of a long term connection.
“I learned how to be friends with everyone, doesn’t matter where you’re from, I can talk to you and have a nice conversation, but to really be close friends, that takes a bit more,” said Ayah.
Beneath Ayah’s social ease lay a deeper avoidant attachment style, common among third culture kids accustomed to mobility. Attachment styles have gone from a psychological term to a trending social media topic. Individuals usually fall into anxious types, who crave closeness, or avoidant types, who keep distance.
Dr Rachel Cason, a therapist dealing with TCKs, explains that attachment often develops from early relationships with caregivers. For TCKs, however, instability is normalised not only in parental relationships but in every bond they form.
“The crystallising element is a lot of us got used to loss repeatedly and seemingly outside of our control, and often just as things are starting to feel close, so that creates a patterning of expected loss,” said Dr Cason.
“Some of us respond to that by being more like let’s get in there and make them love me quick, and a lot of us respond much more cautiously … and of course, the base of both of those anxious and avoidant is a deep desire for intimacy. Avoidants want it just as much, it’s just dangerous.”
Paradoxically, long-term relationships are what can fulfil the TCKs’ need for belonging and stability that they were deprived of in childhood. So why would they avoid the thing that could make them happy?
For Jinoos, the reason was to avoid a disappointing outcome of existing as a misunderstood alien.
“It just takes so much time and energy to make someone understand who you really are, so I did a lot of just observing in the beginning. I didn’t really share much because part of it was probably because I was lazy about it. That’s definitely an aspect because it’s like, where do I even start?”
The complexity of the TCK experience is what pushes them to seek the company of other TCKs, who inherently validate their experiences. The consensus is that to be known is to be loved.
“I didn’t feel like I belonged, so my mom moved me to a more international school … where people are Indian, Chinese, some Canadian, just coming from all over. And that’s where I really made friends, because I think you relate to one another. We’re not fully Canadian, but we grew up here, but our parents come from another culture, and you can sympathise with each other.”
“It pays to keep track because they share a part of my life no one else shares.”
It is a common belief among TCKs that only those who have walked in their shoes can understand them. Despite this, experts have a different opinion.
Ruth Van Reken, the author of Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, argues that it is often those who have lived a stable life who can teach TCKs to break the cycle of fleeing.
“We can work to keep connections, but I think we also have to work a little harder than some because the biggest problem we have, for me is that I always cut people off. I fortunately have friends who don’t let me do that, but they’re the monocultural people, they’re used to keeping friends … … so they’ve taught me something. It pays to keep track because they share a part of my life no one else shares like my high school days, and so we have to work at it, and you can’t keep everybody … but we need to keep somebody from each part of our life,” said Dr Ruth
Dr Cason adds that deep connections come not from shared TCK experiences, but from effort, curiosity, and willingness to learn about each other:
“We conflate ideas of connection around past experiences; just because we might have shared similar plastic experiences, it doesn’t mean that we laugh at the same things,” said Dr Cason.
“I don’t think there is this magical group of people out there kind of who are particularly suited to loving TCKs. … The right people who are curious, secure and open and aligned with our values and interests, are going to get it. They’re not going to understand every element of who we are, and they don’t need to. They just need to be nice and make space for us.”
And those little efforts are never wasted. Even for someone who lived cautiously when it came to relationships, Jinoos would come to realise that her type would mature to become someone who, like her, makes space for different cultures.
“We went to the same wedding in Tanzania which was the wedding of my relative who introduced us and yeah I mean seeing how he was in that context was extremely important for me and how he you know he can eat with his hands, like it sounds, it’s just one example but like he’ll eat with his hands you know, and he’ll do like us and when you know he’s with his family he’ll do like them. Like he’s someone who adapts and who, you know, without any friction, so that was very important for me.”
And as if meeting at a wedding would foreshadow, this man would become Jinoos’s husband, who would learn parts of her that she thought she could never share.
Want a TikTok break? Check out this video to see if you relate with being a Third Culture Kid.
https://www.tiktok.com/@marytarek1/video/7553559539174427937?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc
Similarly, Ruth experienced that mutual understanding can come even with those who seemingly live on a different planet. Her friendship with Silvie seemed to have nothing in common. Ruth had loving parents who travelled often, and Silvie was dealing with parents who never left the country and, in fact, never left the bottle. Yet at the time, they understood each other better than anyone else without having the words to explain it.
“She said I’ve always wondered why we connected, because your parents are missionaries and my parents were alcoholics, but we always seemed to understand each other. And she said, when I read the book, I understood that you had physical separation and I had an emotional separation, but really, you have an emotional separation when I was away. I went to a boarding school at six. So on that feeling level, even though our experiences were a world and a half apart, we could relate.”
TCKs carry hidden griefs and cultural tensions, yet they also enjoy lives of privilege and opportunity. Many keep parts of themselves hidden as protection, balancing parent expectations, cultural norms, and personal identity. Holding a shield can often be about hiding what is behind it.
Dr Cason explains the importance of self-acceptance when nurturing relationships with others. “It also can inhibit the processing we might need to do to accept the parts of us that we desperately want somebody else to accept. And I think that can be an interesting question for us to work with, you know, in my search for somebody to understand me, how much effort have I put into understanding me?”
Living with cultures that are worlds apart, Ayah wrestled with the idea of who she is beyond her parents’ expectations. Despite being settled in the West, a phone call from her mother would remind her of the cultural ties she was expected to keep.
At times, she felt like she would be going into relationships with a package deal that would scare off her type. Yet it took an unexpected turn of events for her to find someone who would happily take that package as a gift.
“It definitely was something I took into consideration. If I met someone I liked, I would think; Can you handle this? But yeah, I would think I was also just lucky to meet someone who kind of just went with the flow, and he didn’t ever judge as well because it’s very easy to judge something you don’t understand,” said Ayah.
Her boyfriend would learn her language. With that, he would slowly uncover parts of her that she never thought would be seen. Her attachment style shifted from avoidant to anxious, a response to finally finding someone worthy of investment. For the first time, Ayah experienced stability she didn’t want to escape. After all, attaching strings turned out to be well worth it.