Why We've Stayed

The Question Nobody Asks But Everyone is Thinking

The question people always ask, always… is why did YOU come to Valencia? The follow up is often simple to answer “Would you ever leave?” But it does leave out the bit in the middle, “What made or makes you stay?

On the first one, my wife got two job offers, one here in Valencian and another in Madrid. It wasn’t a toss up at that point, it was Valencia. Having visited both and knowing a bit about weather and climate there was no competition. So Valencia it was!

The decision to move here is usually romantic, a new life, warmth and colour etc… The decision to stay is more practical.

On the second question the answer is “no, not really” Unless there was no choice… foreigners being thrown out of the country, some horrendous family situation or something. I can’t think of anything currently that would directly make me leave Spain to go somewhere else. It doesn’t mean those things don’t exist of course but my brain isn’t that imaginative.

So why did we stay? The decision to stay in a place you move to that isn’t your original home doesn’t take up a lot of headspace on a daily basis but the most important thing to understand is that the decision to stay is still not passive: it’s active every year. In fact it’s active every month, week and even day in certain ways.

The pull factors of “home” for many people can be strong and regular, family above all but friends, familiarity, language and your personal comfort zone also play their parts and those parts are important. Every year you stay you are making an active decision not to be drawn back into what you moved away from.

Now after over a quarter of a century here in Valencia and over a third of a century in Spain in total I’ve seen so many people come and quite a lot of them go. But many have stayed.

Oh I forgot, you want to know why we have stayed. Let’s get onto that. I could go into the many great things about living in Valencia and Spain but it’s the things that could possibly have dragged me away that you want to know about as I have written copiously both here and on the main VP blog about the great bits of living here.

Let’s look at the many opportunities to leave.

The 2008 great financial crisis and the semi bankruptcy that followed along with bad investment decisions made prior to it: Buying a big house with six other couples anyone? Building a house in Olocau just before the financial sh*t hit the fan and interest rates exploded? Not great decisions and they brought consequences. Repossessions, debt and fallouts.

Brexit and the aftermath and a sense of a loss of identity? Nah that wasn’t a big thing for me because I was so disgusted by the whole Brexit shenanigans; the lying, the BS, the result… after that it would have taken wild horses to drag me back.

The rise of Vox and the far right in general? Not really. Their support seems to have a ceiling in Spain especially as people see what happens when you let right wing populists into power in other countries. After seeing Brexit, Johnson, Truss, Orban and Trump for example and the right wing ideas that brought them, Spain sort of said no thanks. They could get in by a back door deal with the PP after the next elections. That would be bad but would it make me move?

Opportunities abroad? I’ve seen opportunities for jobs and careers in other countries. As a family we were even tempted to look at times when much better paid teaching jobs came up in Thailand, China and Singapore but nothing convinced us that the package was worth it. It would have had to have been something really special to drag us away from Spain where we speak the language, know the culture and have a business and despite the relatively paltry wages my partner had a steady job and career. Add to that us having kids growing up here. Even now with the kids grown up it would have to be something spectacular as we have pretty strong roots here.

The Intangibles

There are so many great tangible things about living in Valencia but we won’t go into them here. However, the intangible benefits of living here are numerous and they help keep me here: The light and warmth are uncontestable, but the people and their warmth, the lack of that expected permanant hustle culture in other places exemplified best by the continuing existence of the siesta, (At least in my life) the rhythms of this life in Spain with its repititions of fiestas and fun each year reminding you that despite time moving on, some things remain the same.

It’s not the cost of living (although it’s low comparatively), it’s not the work culture (Heaven forbid), it’s not the place in the world order (Who cares?), it’s not a feeling of importance, in fact it’s not a lot of things which help people in other countries identify themselves, it’s just a general feeling of contentment despite… everything (At this point I make a gesture to the World). As I talked about a couple of weeks ago here, the feeling of lightness, of not being exhausted by everything going on, of being part of a functioning society as opposed to a Kleptocracy of the ultra wealthy.

But people do leave…

Whether it’s for work reasons, family reasons, the call of “home”, a feeling of not fitting in or just circumstances. People come and people go. And there’s never a single reason that’s the same for everyone.

As I’ve mentioned before those who come here moving towards something as opposed to running away from something where they come from, well, they tend to thrive more in Spain. People can’t run away from everything. These things follow even if it’s just in the mental space

And that thing people are trying to get away from often drags them back because it means that they have never really left. Their thoughts are constantly dragged back to where they came from by the news cycle, and the fact that physically they may be in a different place but mentally especially in these social media, 24-hour news cycle days they never get to really move away.

Nevertheless some do yo-yo. They need to go back “home” to then realise they miss the everyday of Spain, that Spain has become their “home”. Spain gets inside you and when the rhythms of life here hit you they are difficult to replicate elsewhere because other societies just don’t allow those rhythms. So people finish up coming back with more determination to break away from what dragged them back “home” to live a new Spanish reality and a different style of life.

What has it cost me by staying?

I came to Spain as soon as I finished at University. University was actually the lever I used to get out of the UK. However there were costs. The typical life plan in the UK, connections with new friends at University built up over four years as we spread out around the World, connections with old friends from my hometown, already largely broken by leaving that hometown to go to University, family connections especially with my parents and in-laws. Obviously all of these connections became more sporadic and faded more and more as time went on, especially in the days before social media’s glory days (i.e those days before social media became a zero sum extraction game for oligarchs and sociopaths and actually acted to connect people).

That guilt of being away that resurfaces from time to time when something happens in your hometown, your parents ageing, family bereavements etc... These things hit and they can hit hard when you are powerless to help due to being remote and far away. But I would say one thing here, guilt is a useless emotion, we all feel it but it’s pretty pointless unless we are doing something we really should feel guilty about. Trying to live your best life in your four score years and ten on this little blue planet is not something you should feel hugely guilty about

But there is one big question still as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, what does it mean when you are never quite from somewhere? When you are a citizen of nowhere? For me I don’t feel that it’s a big deal but many people never get over that, can never get into that feeling of belonging fully. The guilt can hang hard over them. It shouldn’t but it does.

The Final Word

I want to finish on a simple thing that might explain the why. I suppose the real reason I stayed might be because I have always been in the process of building something here and that work is never finished.

Now over to you in that substack way. What makes you stay in a place? Have you ever stayed somewhere you should have moved from and what kept you there? I look forward to hearing from you about that.

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