Spain – should I stay or should I go?
I’m 42, British, married to a Spanish lady and we have one son. We moved to Spain (Madrid) in late 2019 quite soon after the birth of our son. My wife was on maternity leave, at home alone during the day while I went to work, and I’m guessing she started to get homesick because her mum and sister started sending her job adverts back in Madrid. The whole Brexit debacle was playing out at the time which she says made her feel uncomfortable in the UK, and the company I was working for was potentially being put up for sale leading to redundancies, so we discussed a potential move to Madrid in the summer of 2019. She’s in quite a niche technical field and after interviewing for a couple of positions over Zoom, she found a job very quickly with a decent pay rise over her UK salary.
We landed in Madrid in November 2019 without me finding a job first and then within a few months, Covid hit. Since then, it’s been one stress after another. It took us nearly 9 months to find our own flat, which due to the cost of housing in Madrid is half the size of what we had in the UK, and we’re outside of the city in one of the satellite cities where there isn’t an international community. I managed to find a job in an English academy a year later (October 2020), but I was earning less than €1,000 a month for essentially full-time work. The year after that I still hadn’t found a decent job so worked for another English academy which turned out to be the worst place I have ever worked for – very “culty” atmosphere, unfriendly coworkers, six days a week schedule, barely breaking €1,000 again.
Finally, after that I found something related to my sector (communications) and worked for that company for two and a half years, but it was a very dodgy Spanish SME that did a lot of illegal things, with an owner-boss who was a nightmare to work for (example – he locked one of the younger female members of staff in his office while he was arguing with her after she confronted him about his behaviour). I was eventually dismissed from that company after pushing back too many times, although I managed to win a case for unfair dismissal through SMAC. I’ve now been unemployed for 16 months, and haven’t even had an interview with any companies in Spain in that time. I hear long-term unemployment in the country is very common.
As you can tell, I’ve had a rough time living in Madrid while my wife has pulled ahead in her career. Naturally, we’ve had a lot of marriage problems since moving here, problems that didn’t exist before the move. I actually had to start some online counselling post-Covid because I was feeling very lonely and depressed living in Madrid and started to regret the move after a year. My wife would spend all her time with her mum and we rarely had any quality time together. After a few months the counsellor I was seeing told me that she thought my issue was related to our family dynamic changing and told me that she thought couples counselling was what we needed. We tried that here in Madrid but my wife just didn’t engage with it. She would cry through the sessions (which suggested she knew there were issue) but we never got anywhere. She said that her “red line” was that she would move anywhere within Madrid, but would never leave Madrid again. I told her that I am happy to live in Madrid, but I need a job and purpose here, like I had back in the UK. Unfortunately moving here, I have ended up as a trailing spouse.
I have lived and worked in other countries before Spain, including in Asia, but I’ve never felt stress and burnout to the level that I have felt in Madrid. I struggle to see a future in the country because of the perpetually high unemployment here, the housing crisis, and the increasing anti-immigrant sentiment. Things are not perfect back in the UK, but they are better. My wife is pretty clear that she is back home now, with her family support network, and she won’t leave. I feel paralysed though, and doing what we are currently doing isn’t working for me. Finding some sort of remote job seems like the answer but believe me, it feels like an impossible task with so many companies demanding RTO and the competition is fierce. I really don’t know what to do, and would deeply appreciate any advice from fellow travellers who have been through this before.
