In Russia I had adequate social support: my extended family, my colleagues who were my peers and were very supportive and understanding, almost unlimited dating pool which I hardly tapped, at least not to the extent I potentially could – most of my girlfriends were my peers, which made understanding and common interests and values a natural thing – so whenever I was to start a new relationship the process of bonding was exceedingly easy, it just happened by itself without any effort on my part. I was very busy with my career and was generally satisfied with my social life, I didn’t really want anything special, no responsibilities, no lasting commitments, and my primary goal at that time was to sort out my career aspirations. I wasn’t really concerned about my social life or family, it just happened to me and it was good enough.
In South Africa the situation pretty much repeated itself with slight variations. By chance – it was really a matter of pure luck – I landed in the middle of a very strong, mostly professional, highly educated Russian community. All the people there were for the most part totally awesome, most of them were my friends, peers and colleagues. Some of them were my age, many were older, but for all intents and purposes I was very comfortable and happy: we all had the same interests, the same background, culture, language; even profession was the same for most of my friends there, we were always on the same wavelength – it was my team, my crowd, my people. So my social life was very good, love life was non-existent though for a couple of reasons: the first is essentially the same as back in Russia, my priorities in life at that time lied somewhere else – far away from creating a lasting loving relationship; the second is very different: I suddenly found that my dating pool for the most part disappeared. I did a few clumsy attempts, but the girls were so different that it would have taken an enormous amount of time and energy to make sense of them, to understand their backgrounds, to figure out what makes them tick. The dating in the foreign environment didn’t come naturally to me anymore, and I didn’t really have time or energy available to adapt, learn and understand new dating patterns and the new dating pool. So I did the only thing I could: I just put my love life on hold for three years and enjoyed my career progression and friendship both of which were very satisfying and made me quite happy.
What happened in the States was quite different. The first year was grueling and I couldn’t really do or think of anything else apart from professional survival. I pretty much lost all of my social connections. I mean real life connections: I still talked and wrote to my friends and family but it was about it. My colleagues were different: their background, minds, education, age, life experiences – everything was so different that I didn’t really have much in common to talk about. So as a result, I never made any real friends at work, nothing ever clicked. Not only there was a lack of commonalities and understanding, there was a definite lack of time and energy. Even if I would like to make friends there would have not been any time available to cultivate the friendship – everybody including myself was so exceedingly and - very often miserably – busy. Eventually, when I got some breathing space at work I made quite a few friends from the local international community - half of them Russian-speaking – but the new mix of friends is still extremely different from what I experienced before in SA or Russia. They’re generally younger, from different professions, different walks of life, and different cultures. No automatic attuning for me anymore, no immediate clicks. I have to put a lot of effort into trying to understand them and adjust myself, to bring myself in alignment with their life experiences, interests and expectation. I found myself trying to blend in, which I never had to do before – it’s a rather weird feeling. And now, just because I joined a different crowd, I had to pay a close attention to feedback, I had to develop new criteria of acceptable social behavior and corrective actions; to be accepted I had to adjust myself and develop some new social habits. In all the three years in the USA, I can recall only one couple I didn’t have to make any special effort to understand and be understood, we always talked heart to heart and read each other without even having to say much – and sure enough that couple was from St. Petersburg, my age and my peers in terms of education and background, and sure enough they fucking left a few months ago. And love life… Well, it was so tumultuous that I almost lost control and nearly created a jolly mess of it – a very close call indeed. I made some faux pas, I misread people on many occasions, I simply couldn't diagnose anybody any longer by force of intuition alone – my internal sociometer just didn't function in the new environment and had to be rewired and reprogrammed, if not completely discarded. The whole experience jolted me into the realization that I didn’t understand a fuck and I needed to start learning all over again, pretty much from scratch.
That made me think once more of the emotional price we have to pay for abandoning our birthplace and trying to find our place in other countries and cultures. I would have gladly come back to my home city, but it's as good as gone for me: everything's changed and I wouldn't have recognized people and the lay of the land - in my absence it moved and there's no way back, life goes on. One of my friends told me about coming home after only two years of being abroad: she finally came back and almost all of her old friends gave her cold shoulder, the people she dreamed to meet and reconnect with changed to the extent that she didn't know them any more: they were different, strange people - neither did they recognize her and were interested in reconnection. There's no way back, we have to soldier on and make our new lives in a new land...
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