I Told My Mom I’d Marry a Man Named Victor and Live in Spain. Here’s What Actually Happened.
I was twelve years old on a beach in Tenerife. I turned to my mother and announced, “I’m going to marry a man named Victor. I’m going to live here.”
She probably smiled the way you smile at a kid who just declared she’d be an astronaut by Tuesday.
Years later, I married a Spanish man. His name is Victor. We spent three and a half years on Gran Canaria. The island lay one Canary Island away from the one I’d pointed at as a kid. Close enough that I still get chills telling this story.
Here’s what nobody tells you about moving to the place you dreamed of since childhood. The dream and the reality are two very different countries, even when they share the same postal code.
My resume Meant Nothing Here
With real professional experience and fluent English, I moved to Spain. Hopefully, I’d be fine.
Was I not.
Being perceived as overqualified kept me from getting hired to clean hotel rooms. I couldn’t get hired for the jobs that matched my actual background because my Spanish wasn’t strong enough yet. I was stuck in a strange no-man’s-land. It was too much on paper for the easy jobs, and I lacked language for the real ones.
So I did what a lot of expats end up doing in the beginning: I looked for work in Hungarian and English, wherever I could find it, and built from there. Nobody warns you that your career might have to start over from zero, regardless of what you achieved before you got on the plane.
The Paperwork Miracle I Didn’t Earn
Every expat has a horror story about Spanish bureaucracy — the NIE (foreigner ID number), residency paperwork, endless lines. I braced myself for all of it.
And then, somehow, it just… worked. I was in Zaragoza doing a university course at the time, my now-husband — a soldier who’d stepped out of duty still in uniform — came with me, and the whole process moved almost suspiciously fast. My business registration as a freelancer, all of it. Smooth.
I know I got lucky. I also know that for every person with a story like mine, there’s someone who spent eight months fighting for the same stamp. If you’re planning your own move, don’t assume either outcome — plan for the slow version and be pleasantly surprised if you get the fast one.
The Language Wall Nobody Prepares You For
This is the one that actually broke me a little.
I arrived understanding almost nothing. And 98% of the people around me didn’t speak English — the other 2% technically did, but I couldn’t understand their accent any better than I could understand Spanish. For a while, I was locked out of conversations in two languages at once.
Until I hit A2–B1 level in Spanish, making friends with Spanish speakers was nearly impossible — not because anyone was unfriendly, but because we simply couldn’t understand each other. What saved me socially were other expats. And in one of those small-world moments that still makes me laugh, I made a Hungarian friend within my first week on Gran Canaria — who turned out to live three streets away from me.
You don’t move to a country. You move into a much smaller world inside it, made up of the handful of people who can actually talk to you until you catch up.
Remote Work Turned My Clock Upside Down
These days I work remotely, often for U.S.-based clients, which means I’m the one bending my schedule around everyone else’s time zone. Meetings that are a normal Tuesday afternoon for an American CEO land in the middle of my night. Nobody tells you that “working from Spain” might mean your best focus hours are 11pm.
The Real Culture Shock Wasn’t What I Expected
I thought the culture shock would be the food, or the siesta, or how late dinner happens. It wasn’t.
It was daycare.
In Spain, kids don’t take off their winter boots at nursery — they wear them all day, including back out to the playground. There’s no indoor shoe culture at all, not in daycare, not in preschool, not even at home, where people walk into bedrooms in the shoes they wore outside. In Hungary, changing into indoor shoes is practically law, starting from nursery all the way through elementary school. Coming from that, the hygiene difference genuinely unsettled me.
And academically, preschool here moves fast — four-year-olds are doing work that, in Hungary, wouldn’t show up until age seven. Nobody prepares you for how differently two European countries can raise a child.
Did I Ever Regret It?
Honestly — no. I always knew this was where I wanted to be. That certainty doesn’t mean it was easy. There were plenty of moments that were genuinely hard. But wanting to be here and finding it difficult were never in conflict; both were just true at the same time.
What I’d Tell My Younger Self
In my early twenties, there was a moment I seriously considered giving up on Spanish and switching to learning German instead. If I could go back, I’d tell that version of me one thing: stay with Spanish. Don’t switch.
Every hard month of that language ended up being the foundation for the entire life I’m living now — my marriage, my home, my work, my son growing up bilingual. If you’re standing at that same fork right now, deciding whether a language or a country is “worth it” — I can’t promise it’ll be easy. I can tell you it was worth it.
Have you ever moved somewhere and found the biggest surprise wasn’t the one you braced for?
I’d love to hear your story — drop a comment. And if you’re planning your own move abroad, I’m working on a full relocation checklist based on everything I wish someone had told me — subscribe below so you don’t miss it.
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Life as a working mom is a juggling act — balancing an EA career, raising a family, building a Chogan business on the side, sharing my SuperPatch journey, and (most excitingly) settling into a whole new life in Spain.
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