Every few weeks another R2I video turns up in my feed. A family in Sydney or Dallas or Manchester packs up after six or eight years abroad and moves back to India. The stories are honest and often moving, and the reasons given are remarkably consistent. Three come up again and again:
- Loneliness.
- No house help.
- Not being able to accept Western culture, especially where children are concerned.
I moved from Bangalore to Singapore, and then to the UK. None of those three has applied to me.
I am not saying I did it better. I am saying that in each case the feeling is real but the diagnosis behind it is usually wrong, and once you fix the diagnosis the problem often stops being a reason to leave.
1. Loneliness is real, and it is the most fixable of the three
The clearest version of this argument I have heard came from a man who returned from Australia with his wife and two children after six years. His point was that the friends you make abroad are mostly other NRIs, all of them lonely, and that when two lonely people become friends the relationship turns transactional. You swap recommendations, you help each other move furniture, you meet for a festival. Back home you had friends you had known since you were eleven.
He is right about the shape of it. I felt exactly that for my first few months in Singapore.
It did not last, for two reasons, and only one of them is advice I can pass on.
The first reason is luck, and I want to be honest about it. My wife and I were never at the centre of a big friend group at school or in our twenties. We then moved cities for education and again for work, so our circle reset every few years anyway. We had already done the grieving that most people do only when they emigrate. On top of that, a few of our old friends happened to move to the UK around the same time we did, and we deliberately chose to live in the same part of the city so that meeting was a fifteen minute problem rather than a ninety minute one. Not everyone gets that.
The second reason is method, and this part is repeatable:
- Go to the community events, but do not just attend. Every major Western city has Indian and regional community groups, festival committees, sports clubs and hobby meetups. Attending gets you a nod. Offering to help organise gets you everyone's phone number, because the organisers are the ones who talk to every single person in the room.
- Get past small talk early. After the second or third conversation with someone, ask a real question. My standard one is some version of: do you think of your move abroad as a success? Nobody has a rehearsed answer to that. You find out in about ninety seconds whether this is a person you want to know properly.
- Choose proximity over everything. The single biggest predictor of whether a friendship survives is how easy it is to see each other on a Tuesday. When you are picking where to live, weigh this alongside schools and commute.
- Give it eighteen months. Adult friendships in a new country do not compress. If you judge the experiment at month six, you will always conclude that you are lonely.
- Do not restrict yourself to the diaspora. More on this below, because it turns out to be the fix for problem three as well.
Here is the part that surprised me most. I have more friends in the UK than I had in Bangalore. Some of that is the time I have put in. But a large part of it is a scheduling accident that nobody talks about: most of my friends in India work in IT, and a lot of them work for US or UK companies on those hours. Their evenings are gone. In the UK, for most people including those in tech, the working day ends when it says it ends. Friendship is mostly made of repeated low effort contact, and weekday evenings are where that contact happens. India took my weekday evenings away. The UK gave them back.
2. The house help problem is really a chores problem, and the chores here are different
I grew up in a house where my father refused to hire domestic help on principle. He believed you should do your own work. We had nobody until my parents got older and genuinely needed the help. I carried that into my four years in Bangalore. My wife independently arrived at something similar, partly because she saw very cheap domestic labour as exploitative, and partly because she was not comfortable having conversations about our own lives in front of someone employed in the house. We tried a cook for a few weeks and stopped.
So when we moved abroad, we had no habit to break. That is the honest reason this one never bit us, and it is not advice.
The advice is this: the workload itself is smaller here, and most people arriving from India do not realise how much of it has been designed away.
Dishes. A dishwasher, used properly, replaces the entire evening ritual. Scrape, do not rinse. Load the heavily soiled items facing the spray arms. Run it when it is genuinely full, not when it is half full. In a hard water area, keep the salt reservoir topped up and use rinse aid, otherwise you get the chalky film that makes people conclude their dishwasher is useless. Wash the two or three large pans by hand while the machine runs. That is fifteen minutes a day, total.
Floors. There is far less dust here than in an Indian city, and a lot of the house is carpeted, so the daily sweep and mop simply does not apply. A quick vacuum every other day covers the kitchen and the high traffic areas. Hard floors get mopped about once a month. Surfaces get dusted every couple of weeks.
What we actually pay. We do have a cleaner: around £13 an hour, three hours a fortnight, so roughly £78 a month. That is a choice, not a necessity, and I could drop it tomorrow without the house falling apart.
The rest of it is automation and cadence rather than labour. A slow cooker or air fryer, one proper cooking session at the weekend, and online grocery delivery remove most of the days when you are too tired to face the kitchen. The Indian model substitutes labour. The Western model substitutes machines and batching. Once you see it that way, the absence of a maid stops feeling like a hardship and starts feeling like a different operating procedure.
One honest exception. Childcare is genuinely harder here. It is expensive, and there is no equivalent of a live-in helper or grandparents twenty minutes away. If your R2I decision is really about childcare and family support, that is a legitimate reason and I would not argue with it. But it is a different problem from missing a maid, and it deserves to be named accurately, because the solutions are different.
3. The culture question is actually three separate questions
This is the one that generates the real heat at community events. It is worth splitting apart, because people tend to argue all three at once.
Before anything else: most of what NRIs believe about Western family life comes from television. Think about how Indian life is depicted in Western cinema. Slumdog Millionaire is a good film and a terrible documentary. Nobody would accept it as a description of how Indian families work. The Western content we consume deserves exactly the same scepticism, and yet a lot of people are making a permanent relocation decision based on it.
Independence in raising children
I like the emphasis on independence here, and I think it produces more confident adults. But two corrections to how this usually gets described.
First, the sleep point, which people constantly get wrong in both directions. UK guidance is not that babies sleep alone from birth. The NHS and The Lullaby Trust advise that a baby sleeps in the same room as a parent, in their own cot, for at least the first six months, because it lowers the risk of SIDS. What happens around six months is a transition to their own room, and many families do it later. So the practice is not "abandon the baby", it is "share a room while it matters, then build independent sleep". Parents get uninterrupted nights, children learn to settle themselves, and everyone is better company during the day.
Second, the schooling anxiety. I used to describe this as Western families not caring whether children study hard. That is lazy. What is actually different is the cost of a mistake. In India, a handful of marks in one exam at seventeen can determine the next decade, and there are very few second doors. Here there are apprenticeships, foundation years, entry to university at twenty-five, and career changes at thirty-five that nobody finds remarkable. Indian parenting intensity is a rational response to scarcity and a brutal filter. It is not a moral virtue that you are obliged to export. If you have moved permanently and your children will grow up inside a system with more doors, applying the pressure that suited the old system is just imported anxiety.
There is a real caveat here. If your immigration status is uncertain, or you plan to return, then keeping your children fluent in Indian expectations is sensible, because they will need it. What I question is doing that while holding settled status and no intention of leaving. That is hedging against a future you are not going to have.
Do Western families really abandon their parents?
The evidence against this is not statistical; it is anecdotal, and you can only collect it by getting out of the bubble.
I have been fortunate to work at early stage startups in the UK where most colleagues were British or European, in offices where people actually talked about their lives. What I found: an Australian colleague who flew home once or twice a year without fail. European colleagues who went home most long weekends, because Europe is close. One American who flew to Alaska every single year to see his family.
Now compare. Once a year is also the diaspora norm. NRIs in the US caught in H-1B stamping delays sometimes go three to five years between visits. If seeing your parents annually is proof that Westerners do not love their families, the same test convicts most of us.
The genuine difference is not affection, it is the default assumption about elderly care. In India the expectation is that a child, usually a son, houses the parents. In the UK the default is independent living for as long as possible, supported by paid or state care. That is a real divergence and it is worth thinking about clearly, on its own terms, rather than filing it under "they do not love their parents." It is also worth noticing that urban India is drifting the same way. Most Indians already leave home at eighteen for university, then move to a metro city that is nowhere near their hometown. The joint family has been quietly dissolving for a generation.
Marriage, dating and relationships
First, a correction I need to make to my own vocabulary, and one I see NRIs make constantly.
A civil partnership is not the same as living together. In England and Wales, a civil partnership is a formal registered legal status, available to same-sex couples since 2005 and to opposite-sex couples since 31 December 2019. It carries rights very close to marriage, and ending one requires a dissolution process with the same financial claims available as in a divorce.
What people actually mean when they describe the Western "live-in" norm is cohabiting, which is a completely different thing legally. There is no such thing as common law marriage in England and Wales. No amount of time living together creates rights. This matters enormously for the argument I want to make, because cohabiting is genuinely a low cost trial while a civil partnership is not.
With that fixed, the numbers support the practice. Cohabiting couple families are the fastest growing family type in the UK, at roughly 3.6 million families, about 18 per cent of the total. And of opposite-sex couples who married in 2022, around nine in ten had lived together first, up from roughly six in ten in 1994. Living together before marriage is not an alternative to marriage here. It has become the normal route into it.
Practical warning, because this is where NRIs get hurt. If you are going to cohabit long term, especially if you are buying property together or one of you is stepping back from work for children, get a cohabitation agreement, a declaration of trust on the property, and a will. Without those, the financially weaker partner can walk away from years of shared life with nothing. Please do not rely on a phrase you heard in a film.
On divorce rates. People defending arranged marriage often point out that India's recorded divorce rate is around one per cent, among the lowest in the world, and treat that as evidence of successful marriages. I do not think it is. A divorce rate measures how hard it is to leave, not how good it is to stay. Stigma, financial dependence on a spouse, and the absence of any social path back for a divorced woman all suppress that number long before satisfaction enters the picture. Urban divorce rates in India have been climbing steadily, and it would be strange to conclude that Indian marriages suddenly became worse rather than that leaving got easier.
I will give the counterargument its due: easy exit can also mean people leave marriages that were repairable, and the West is not obviously winning at this. My claim is narrower. Low divorce is not evidence of high satisfaction, and it should stop being used as one.
On arranged marriage. My own view, and it is only a view, is that choosing a life partner from a shortlist assembled by other people over a handful of supervised meetings is a poor process for one of the largest decisions you will make. Plenty of arranged marriages are happy. I think they are happy in spite of the process rather than because of it, and I would rather my own children had years to find out who somebody is.
On teenagers. The fear here is drinking, smoking, drugs and early relationships. The data does not support the picture NRI parents are carrying around. In England, the share of 11 to 15 year olds who had ever smoked has fallen from 49 per cent in 1996 to 11 per cent in 2023, with just 3 per cent smoking currently. The proportion of 13 to 15 year olds who had ever had an alcoholic drink fell from 71 per cent in 1999 to 35 per cent in 2019. Selling alcohol or tobacco to anyone under 18 is illegal and the Challenge 25 scheme is enforced far more consistently than any equivalent in India. Vaping is the genuine new concern, at around 9 per cent, and that is worth your attention far more than the imagined scenario in your head.
The teenager you are afraid of is largely a character from a film released fifteen years ago. Meanwhile the exposure in a metro Indian city is not meaningfully different, and it comes with weaker enforcement.
What I am not saying
I am not saying nobody should return. There are excellent reasons to go back, and I would not argue with any of them:
- Parents who are ageing and need you physically present, not on a video call.
- Visa insecurity, which poisons every long term decision you try to make.
- Work that only exists in India, or a business you can only build there.
- Simply preferring the life. That is a complete reason on its own and needs no justification.
What I am saying is that the three reasons cited most often in R2I conversations are the three most fixable. Loneliness responds to method and to eighteen months of patience. The house help problem is a chores problem with a different set of tools. And the culture fear is mostly built from television, held by people who have never had a long conversation with a local colleague about their family.
If you are going to move back, move back towards something. Moving away from a problem you have not correctly identified tends to mean you take it with you.