Interesting question.
I moved on my own. I settled in fine and felt immediately happy. I did have the usual ups and downs of depression an expat gets, but overall all good. I have an excellent and close relationship with my sisters and parents and friends back home, thanks to email, Facetime, Skype, and Facebook. My nieces and nephews know me well.
All but one sister has been to visit me here a few times and parents have been a few times as well. I've had friends come and visit as well, and many came for my wedding, which is really nice and awesome.
However, I am a person with a lot of wanderlust, but getting a job where I travel a lot really helped quell that. But you know, due to financial woes in the company, at the moment I've not travelled at all and man are my feet itchy!!!
My husband, until we built our house in 2015, lived within a half a mile radius between the ages of 3-36 years old. He didn't go away to uni, unlike most young folks around here. Even now, we only live 10 miles from where he grew up. He doesn't want to go anywhere.
And hey, I can't blame him. We live in a tiny village, we have cows and sheep for neighbours. We are 10 miles into a small city. I love my allotment. I love that I can hit mountain bike trails right from my house. The music scene around here is unbelievable for such a small place and I have incredible opportunities.
We have an awesome house, though not our forever house ,actually, because architectural folks are never happy with the first house they have built for themselves, apparently. That's fine, I am happy to build another one, further out in the countryside!
The job scene worries me. My company is pretty much one of a kind and not sure with type of engineering I do if I would have a local job, should I lose it. Hmmm...
Not feeling any particular pull to move back to the USA. If I did, I'd like to move somewhere rural, with a lot of land, with pigs and goats and sheep and cows and chickens and a huge vegetable garden where tomatoes grow outside and not in my greenhouse.
