I've written about this before, about how hard it is to be far away from your friends and miss out on their lives. This becomes especially important when they get married and start having kids – unless they live in a country adjacent to yours to where you can get decently cheap Ryanair flights.
The sad truth of it is that I have now tiered my friends. I'm not worried about writing this and posting it in the ether because I've told them all before. Basically, I have had to be coldly rational and mentally sub-divide my friends as follows:
- People who, if they get engaged and invite me to their wedding, receive a card
- People who, if they get engaged and invite me to their wedding, receive a card and gift
- People who, if they get engaged and invite me to their wedding receive me in person at their wedding
The number of people in each category diminishes the farther you go down the list.
I haven't done this out of cruelness, but out of necessity. I'm at the age where every day brings another Facebook relationship status change to "engaged" and a subsequent "if I invite you will you come" email. And I can't go, most of the time. Airfare has gotten so expensive, and hotels are so expensive, and it's not fair to The Irishman to have to use all of his money and all of his holiday days to jet over to America for my friends' weddings.
This is coming up because one of my friends is getting married in Florida in April. She is in the bottom tier, someone whose wedding I will not miss despite only having gotten engaged 6 weeks ago thus giving me 5 weeks notice (it's okay, she's ALWAYS late). But now my challenge is to decide whether to go to the wedding for the weekend, or morph it into a week's vacation in Florida. This is definitely a "first world problem" but one that is important - to me - as I'm trying to make it to see my friends get married on the beach without breaking the bank, and get the most value out of a 10 hour flight.
This is the sad reality of expat life: weighing the pros and cons of jetlag, hotels, and baggage fees just to share your friends' big moments. It's another sad reality that I desperately wish, at moments like this, that I traveled more for work so that I had more frequent flyer miles in the bank – even though business travel, especially the up-and-down- in-and-out-in-a-day type, is absolutely exhausting. But at least I could redeem some miles for an upgrade or something.
This is the sad reality of expat life: weighing the pros and cons of jetlag, hotels, and baggage fees just to share your friends' big moments. It's another sad reality that I desperately wish, at moments like this, that I traveled more for work so that I had more frequent flyer miles in the bank – even though business travel, especially the up-and-down- in-and-out-in-a-day type, is absolutely exhausting. But at least I could redeem some miles for an upgrade or something.
This part of expat life is not glamorous, nor is it exciting; it is exhausting and tedious and often heartbreaking. Yet had someone actually given me this heads up before I moved abroad, I'm not sure I would have taken it seriously. It's just one of the things you have to accept with the visa, like being called love all of the time and standing in long immigration lines.
