When Relationships Change Abroad

Episode 087, House of Peregrine with Mickelle.

“What do you actually hear when someone says they want an open relationship?”

That was Mickelle’s question. I wasn’t expecting it to be that direct.

I told her: an opening sentence. Not a decision. Not a conclusion. A beginning. Because in my experience, the desire to open a relationship almost never starts with desire for other people. It starts with a need that hasn’t found its right name yet. More aliveness. More honesty. More room to be who you’re becoming rather than who you were when you made the original agreement.

Sometimes people talk for an hour and realise they don’t want an open relationship at all. They want their existing one to wake up.

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We talked for a long time about what moving abroad does to couples.

You don’t just change your address when you move countries. You change your reference points, your social mirror, the invisible rules you’d been following without knowing you’d agreed to them. In Amsterdam especially, people find themselves surrounded by relationship models they’d never seen up close before. And that visibility does something. It makes certain questions possible that weren’t possible before.

What do I actually want? Is this working? Am I allowed to want something different?

One partner often gets there before the other. That gap rarely announces itself as a gap. It shows up as distance. A particular quality of silence at dinner. The way someone stops asking about your day not because they’re busy but because they’ve quietly stopped being curious.

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Jealousy came up, as it always does.

I’ve stopped treating it as a problem to be managed. It’s more useful as a question. When jealousy arrives, something underneath it is trying to get your attention. Fear of losing relevance. An unmet need that hasn’t been spoken. Sometimes grief for a version of the relationship that left while everyone was looking elsewhere.

The people who navigate jealousy well are not the ones who feel less of it. They’re the ones who get curious rather than reactive. They ask: what is this pointing at?

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The part of the conversation that stayed with me longest was about betrayal.

We’ve narrowed the definition down so far that most people think it requires a third person. It doesn’t. Betrayal can also be the slow withdrawal of investment. The decision to stop bringing yourself to the relationship without saying so. Emotional disengagement that happens in increments, invisible, until one day there is almost nothing left to open.

Physical infidelity often happens after that. Not before.

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By the end, we kept returning to one word: sustainable.

Not whether a relationship was open or closed. Whether the two people inside it were genuinely choosing it. Updating it. Remaining honest about what they needed from it.

Ethical non-monogamy, when it’s real, is not a shortcut around intimacy. It’s one of the more demanding relationship structures that exists. More communication, not less. More accountability. More willingness to disappoint someone you love and stay in the room after.

Ethical takes more energy, not less.

That’s not a warning. It’s a description of what love looks like when you are paying attention.

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Listen to the full episode at House of Peregrine, or watch below.

Victoria Onken is a relationship coach based in Amsterdam, working with individuals and couples navigating relationship change, consent, and sustainable love.