Why we’re moving to the United Kingdom

A while ago, as we were discussing the big move, my husband Sam asked, “We’re doing the right thing, right?” And I said (in a very wise voice, obviously), “I don’t think there’s a right or wrong choice here. We’re doing what we want, and that’s good enough.”

We have a few reasons to move, some minor and some major and some that maybe shouldn’t be so important but are anyways:

We want to love where we live.

We’ve been in our current city in the United States since 2015. Like so much that happens in life, it wasn’t really planned this way. A job brought us here and then building our family kept us here. And it’s always been just . . . okay. What a funny thing, feeling just okay about the place you live, never really feeling at home. We really want to be more intentional about where we move this next time and really find a place that we love.

Maybe that sounds naive, maybe it is. But after living through a real actual pandemic, we feel acutely aware that this is our one life, and we want to make the most of it.

England is my husband’s home.

Sam is from the UK. He has lived stateside for me for a collective decade. He misses his people, his culture, his friends and his family. In the UK our daughters will have lots of extended family - aunts, uncles and cousins - whom we’d love for them to get to know for the first time. Sam’s parents are aging and he’d like to spend more time with them before it’s too late.

Being part of an international couple is so great. You get to adopt another country and culture as your own, and you get to share yours in turn. But it also means that one person is always going to be farther away from their home country. For most of our relationship, my husband has drawn the short straw. Now I need to take him to the pub and soothe his weary soul.

We can’t stand US politics.

Hot take, I know. We moved back to the States from London in 2015, that glorious pre-Trump era where we didn’t know how good we had it. On the day the Brexit vote went through, my husband turned to me and said, “Well, that’s it, Trump is going to win.” I didn’t believe him, but of course he was right. Harumph.

UK politics isn’t great either, but it hasn’t yet reached the level of doom and hellscape that permeates the US these days. (The crumbling women’s rights, for example.)

The gun culture is terrifying.

Once I had to do an active shooting training for work, and it sucked. The trainer described the Virginia Tech massacre in detail, explaining survival tactics to a room full of choked-up, queasy office workers.

My kids won’t have to attend active shooter training in the UK. Isn’t that reason enough to want to move? And I won’t have to listen to politicians talk about arming teachers. Uvalde was a true turning point. Sam and I had been casually talking about an eventual return to the UK, and then Uvalde happened. I was reading the news, pregnant, crying, and my husband came in and said, “Let’s get out of this country.”

Health care stuff is a bummer.

I’m so sick of dealing with the health insurance and the medical bills and the HSA and the deductible and all the other hoops we have to jump through in this country to get medical care. (Isn’t everyone?)

It’s crazy that we make job decisions based on health insurance. It’s crazy that I just got a $300 bill for a 15-minute appointment with an allergist who said, “How’s she doing? Everything the same? Okay, then, byeee!”

I don’t even want to think about all the time and money and energy I’ve spent managing our family’s health care. Sure, the NHS isn’t perfect, but it’s sounding pretty good right about now.

England has its perks.

With all that said, the UK is looking pretty good right now. There’s still a sense of decorum and kindness in the air. There’s robust public transportation in most places. You won’t go bankrupt if you have a medical emergency. It’s close to all the culture and history of Europe. Of course, I’m kind of looking at things through rose-tinted glasses, but if you piled everything onto one of those justice scales, with the reasons to stay in the US on one side and the reasons to move to the UK on the other side, it’s definitely tipping toward Blighty.