When You're Ready for Nomad Life But Your Partner Isn't: Let's Go There
Three years of "not yet" isn't waiting... it's an answer. Here's the conversation that surfaces what's actually true, and the three ways it's most likely to go.
This question comes from Amy in London:
“My husband and I have been talking about going fully remote and traveling abroad for three years. I’m ready, but he keeps moving the goalposts… one more bonus cycle, then after his mum’s surgery, then when the dog is older, then when we save more.
I’ve spent time with nomad groups in Cape Town and Brazil and I genuinely can’t picture going back to working from home in our flat. I love him. But I don’t know how much longer I can keep waiting for a yes that maybe isn’t coming.
How do I have this conversation without it landing as an ultimatum?”
Amy, the first thing I want to say is that the conversation you’ve been having for three years isn’t the conversation you need to have. The reason it isn’t working is that you’ve been treating this as a shared goal you’re trying to time. The evidence suggests it might not be one.
A shared goal looks like two people pulling in the same direction at slightly different speeds.
What you’re describing looks different. You’re pulling. He’s offering reasons not to pull yet. Each time one reason resolves, another appears. I’ll do it, but not yet. I’ll do it, but only after this. I’ll do it, but the conditions aren’t right.
If you’ve been in this loop for three years, the conditions aren’t the obstacle. The conditions are the cover.
“We’ll do it eventually” sounds like a yes that’s been postponed. It isn’t. It’s a decision… just not the one you think you’re waiting on.
In reality, he’s been letting you believe you both want the same thing, when it’s possible — maybe likely — that you don’t. He may not know that’s what he’s doing. He may genuinely have intended to want it, in some abstract way, when you first started talking. But three years of evidence is data. He doesn’t want to go in the way you’ve been picturing it, and he hasn’t said so.
That isn’t a betrayal. People do this all the time, especially in long marriages, especially when the thing being asked of them feels like it would change the whole shape of their life. Saying not yet is easier than saying I don’t want this, and saying I don’t want this is easier than saying I don’t think I want this with you.
He may not even know which of those is true for him.
So from here on, you aren’t trying to get him to commit to a date. You’ve tried that, in a hundred different ways, for three years. You’re trying to find out whether you actually want the same thing — and if you don’t, what each of you wants instead, and whether those two things can fit inside the same marriage.
That requires you both to stop pretending you’re aligned and start saying what’s actually true. Including, possibly, things you haven’t said to yourselves.
Whatever the answer turns out to be, it isn’t going to be that one of you is wrong and the other is right. No one person can meet all of another person’s needs. That isn’t a failure of the relationship. It’s the basic shape of being a person.
The question is whether the needs you each have can be met inside the configuration the two of you build — or whether some of them have to be met somewhere else, or not at all, and you have to decide what that costs.
That’s the conversation. It isn’t an ultimatum. An ultimatum assumes you already know what you want him to do. This conversation acknowledges that you don’t yet know whether you want the same things, and finding out is the work.
Let's Go There is the column where readers send me the questions they've been carrying around. If you've got one, send to hello@midlifenomads.com.
