Mistakes & Myths

The Honeymoon Phase: Why Year One Lies to You

The first year is exciting. Everything is new, the weather is beautiful, and you're living the dream. Then winter comes, the novelty fades, and you're stuck in a house with a broken boiler trying to explain the problem to a plumber who doesn't speak English. Year two is when most people either settle in or start planning their exit. Here's how to prepare for both.

What the Honeymoon Phase Is

The honeymoon phase is a well-documented phenomenon in expatriate psychology. For roughly the first 6 to 18 months of living in a new country, everything feels exciting, novel, and better than expected. Daily tasks that would be unremarkable at home become small adventures. Inconveniences that would irritate you in your own country feel like charming quirks of Italian life. Problems that are genuinely serious feel temporary and solvable, because you are still running on the energy of the decision itself.

This is not weakness or naivety. It is how human psychology handles major life changes. Your brain is in exploration mode, releasing dopamine at novel experiences and actively filtering negative information to support the decision you have already made and cannot easily reverse. You have told everyone you are moving to Italy. You have sold or rented your home. You have invested money and emotional energy. Your brain is strongly motivated to confirm that this was the right choice, and it does so by amplifying the positive and minimising the negative. Psychologists call this confirmation bias. Expatriates call it the honeymoon.

The problem is not the honeymoon itself. The problem is making permanent decisions during it. People buy property during the honeymoon. They commit to renovations during the honeymoon. They tell friends and family that they will never come back during the honeymoon. Then the honeymoon ends, and they are locked into commitments made under the influence of a temporary psychological state.

The Classic Curve

0-6 mo

Euphoria

6-18 mo

Gradual decline

18-24 mo

Culture shock crisis

2+ years

Adaptation or exit

This U-curve model was first described by Kalervo Oberg in 1960 and has been observed repeatedly in expatriate research since. The timing varies by individual, but the shape is remarkably consistent.

Why Year One Lies

Year one does not give you accurate information about what it is like to live somewhere. It gives you information about what it is like to be new somewhere, which is a fundamentally different experience. Here is what distorts the picture.

Everything Is Novel

Buying bread at the forno in the village feels like an adventure. Walking to the piazza at sunset with a view of the Maiella feels magical. Ordering your coffee at the bar feels like a cultural accomplishment. By year three, it is just buying bread, walking home, and getting coffee. The novelty that made ordinary moments feel special wears off, and what remains is the ordinary itself. If the ordinary is enough for you, this is fine. If the appeal was primarily the novelty, there is nothing to replace it once it fades.

You Have Not Needed Things Yet

In year one, the systems you have not tested seem perfectly adequate. You have not needed emergency plumbing on a Sunday, when the only plumber who answers his phone is an hour away and charges accordingly. You have not needed medical care for a serious issue and discovered the nearest specialist is in Pescara or Chieti with a four-month waiting list. You have not needed urgent building work and found that every geometra in the province is booked for the next six months. When everything is working, the system seems fine. When you need it under pressure, you discover the gaps between what you assumed was available and what actually is.

Your Support Network Is Still Fresh

In the early months, friends and family back home are still engaged with your adventure. Video calls are frequent. People ask questions. They are interested. The connection feels strong, even across the distance. Over time, the rhythm changes. Time zone differences make spontaneous calls harder. You miss events: a friend's wedding, a family birthday, a parent's hospital visit. The people at home move on with their lives, and your stories about Italian bureaucracy become less interesting to them than they are to you. The long-distance relationships that felt effortless in month three require deliberate maintenance by month eighteen, and many people discover they have not been doing enough of it.

You Are Still in Tourist Mode

Year one involves a lot of exploring. You visit the coast, the mountains, the nearby towns. You try restaurants. You drive to neighbouring regions for day trips. You discover the trabocchi along the Costa dei Trabocchi, the castles in the Tirino valley, the markets in Sulmona. You are essentially an extended tourist who happens to sleep in the same place every night. Actual living, the routines, the repetition, the unremarkable days where nothing interesting happens and you spend the morning dealing with a utility bill, has not started yet. When it does, the experience changes fundamentally.

The Weather Is Cooperating

Perhaps you arrived in spring or early summer. The Italian summer was extraordinary. Autumn was warm and golden. You have not yet experienced the Abruzzo winter that does not end. The house that felt charming in June feels cold and damp in January when the heating system cannot keep up, the walls are condensating, and the nearest town is 20 minutes of icy roads away. In inland Abruzzo, winter is genuinely hard. Temperatures regularly drop well below zero. Snow can close mountain roads for days. The grey weeks where the peaks disappear into cloud and the village feels like the edge of the world are not in anyone's social media feed, but they are a significant part of the year.

What Changes in Year Two

Somewhere between month twelve and month twenty-four, the shift happens. For most people it is gradual: a slow accumulation of small disappointments, irritations, and moments of doubt that individually seem insignificant but collectively change the texture of daily life. For some, it arrives more abruptly, triggered by a specific event: an emergency that the system could not handle, a bureaucratic failure that felt intolerable, a missed family occasion that made the distance suddenly real.

What It Looks Like

Daily routines that felt novel now feel monotonous. The same walk, the same bar, the same limited options that once seemed quaint now seem constraining. Frustrations that you dismissed as temporary in year one now feel permanent. The bureaucracy is not going to improve. The tradespeople are not going to start calling back. The village shop is not going to stock what you want.

The language barrier, which felt like a fun challenge in the early months, becomes exhausting. You are tired of not understanding, tired of being misunderstood, tired of the cognitive effort that every interaction requires. You start avoiding situations that demand Italian rather than seeking them out.

Missing events at home starts to hurt differently. It is no longer an abstract cost of the adventure. It is specific: you were not there when your mother needed you, you missed your best friend's child being born, you could not attend a funeral. These absences accumulate, and the guilt or sadness they produce does not fade as easily as the initial excitement suggested it would.

The local friendships you expected have not materialised, or have not deepened beyond friendly greetings. You are still "the English one" or "the foreigner in that house on the hill." Financial reality has diverged from initial optimism. The renovation cost more, the running costs are higher, and the income situation is tighter than you planned.

You have stopped exploring and started existing. The distinction matters.

None of this is failure. It is the normal progression that almost every expatriate experiences. The question is not whether the honeymoon will end. It will. The question is what you do when it does.

Warning Signs During Year One

Even during the honeymoon, certain patterns suggest the crash will be harder when it comes. These are worth watching for honestly, because they are easier to address early than after they have hardened into entrenched behaviour.

No Italian Progress

If after a year you still cannot have basic conversations, cannot follow the general sense of what someone is saying, cannot manage simple transactions without pointing or using a translation app, the path to integration narrows dramatically. Language is the gateway to everything else: friendship, practical independence, cultural understanding, the ability to solve your own problems. Without it, you remain dependent and isolated regardless of how long you stay.

Only Expatriate Friends

If your entire social circle is other foreigners, you are building a parallel community rather than joining the existing one. Expatriate groups provide valuable support, especially early on, but they can also become a comfortable barrier to real adaptation. The conversations in expat groups tend to reinforce a particular narrative about Italy: part appreciation, part complaint, part mutual reassurance that the challenges are Italy's problem rather than an adjustment you need to make. If after a year you have no Italian friends or even Italian acquaintances you speak to regularly, the bubble is forming.

Partner Divergence

If one partner is thriving and the other is struggling, and neither is talking about it honestly, the gap will widen. The thriving partner does not want to hear complaints because they threaten the dream. The struggling partner does not want to complain because it feels like betrayal. This silence is more dangerous than open disagreement, because it allows resentment to build without any mechanism for addressing it.

Idealising Home

When you start remembering home as better than it actually was, forgetting the reasons you wanted to leave, a distortion is operating. Nostalgia is not memory. It is a selective reconstruction that emphasises comfort and familiarity while erasing the dissatisfaction that drove you away. If you find yourself comparing idealised home to flawed Italy, the comparison is rigged and will always produce the same answer.

Withdrawal Behaviours

Spending increasing amounts of time on screens connected to home: news from your old country, social media, streaming services in your own language. Not leaving the house for days. Avoiding interactions that require Italian. Drinking more than you did before you moved. These are retreat behaviours, signals that the gap between expectation and reality is becoming too uncomfortable to face directly. They are not character flaws. They are indicators that something needs attention.

Preparing for the Shift

The honeymoon ending is not preventable. But the severity of the crash depends significantly on what you do during the easy period. The expatriates who navigate the transition best are those who used year one to build the foundations that sustain them in year two, rather than coasting on the initial high.

Year One Actions That Pay Off Later

1.Invest heavily in language. Do not coast on survival phrases and gestures. Take structured lessons. Practise daily, even when it is embarrassing and slow. The goal is conversational Italian by month twelve, not "eventually" or "when I have time." Every month you delay is a month of integration you lose.

2.Build local routines early. Go to the same bar at the same time. Shop at the same market stall. Walk the same route. Italians warm to consistency and familiarity. The barista who has seen you every morning for six months will start talking to you. The market vendor who knows your face will start remembering what you like. These small, repeated interactions are the foundation of community belonging, not grand gestures.

3.Pursue structured activities. Join something: a sports team, a walking group, the local Pro Loco (civic association), a cooking class, a volunteer organisation. Structured interaction creates relationship opportunities that casual encounters in the piazza do not. You need a reason to see the same people regularly, and shared activity provides that reason.

4.Keep honest records. Write down frustrations alongside highlights. Note the things that irritated you, the things you missed, the moments of doubt. When the honeymoon ends and you feel like everything has suddenly become difficult, these records will show you that year one was never as perfect as your memory is now insisting it was. This is surprisingly useful.

5.Maintain home connections deliberately. Scheduled calls, not just sporadic messages. Planned visits in both directions. Real investment in the relationships that matter, rather than assuming they will survive on goodwill alone. The connections that atrophy in year one are much harder to rebuild in year two when you need them most.

Pushing Through (Or Not)

When the honeymoon ends, three options present themselves. Two of them are reasonable. One is not.

Push Through to Adaptation

The difficulty is real, but it is also temporary for those who continue to invest in language, community, and engagement. Most expatriates who commit to the process reach genuine adaptation after two to three years. Life normalises. Italy becomes home, with all the ordinary irritations and satisfactions that home always has. The extraordinary moments still happen, but they are no longer the point. The point is the ordinary life you have built, and whether it is a life you actually want. Reaching this stage requires sustained effort during the hardest period, which is precisely when effort feels most futile. That is the paradox: the moment when you most want to give up is often the moment just before things stabilise.

Strategic Exit

Recognising that the move was wrong and leaving before the sunk-cost fallacy traps you is not failure. It is honest self-assessment. Some people discover that what they wanted from Italy does not exist, or that expatriate life is not suited to their personality, or that the specific location they chose is wrong even if Italy itself might be right. Leaving with clarity and learning is better than staying out of stubbornness. The key is to make this decision from a considered position, not from the bottom of the post-honeymoon dip when everything looks bleak. If after six months of genuine effort beyond the honeymoon you are still unhappy, the evidence is worth taking seriously.

Limbo

This is the worst option, and it is more common than either of the others. Not committing to integration, not leaving. Complaining about Italy without doing anything to change the situation. Staying out of stubbornness, pride, or fear of admitting the decision was wrong. Spending years in a holding pattern where you are neither happy nor willing to act on your unhappiness. People in limbo are visible in every expatriate community: they have been in Italy for years, their Italian is basic, their social circle is entirely foreign, and their primary conversational topic is everything that is wrong with the country they chose to live in. This pattern benefits nobody, least of all the person stuck in it.

The honeymoon ending does not mean the move was wrong. It means the move is finally beginning. Whether you stay or leave should be decided in clear daylight, not in the fog of post-honeymoon disillusionment. Give yourself time to see the situation clearly before acting on it.

The Bottom Line

Year one is not representative. The magic will fade. What replaces it, genuine belonging or chronic dissatisfaction, depends largely on what you build during the honeymoon period. Use the easy months to do the hard work: learn the language, join something, build routines, keep records, maintain relationships at home. The expatriates who thrive long-term in Abruzzo are not the ones who had the best honeymoon. They are the ones who used the honeymoon to prepare for the reality that followed it.