Note: This post was inspired by Sabrina from bookish sabrina, who asked me on Instagram to talk about why Copenhagen, and how the move is going. I’m tackling the first question today, and I’ll get to the second one in a future newsletter. If you have questions or things you’d like me to write about, feel free to just reply to this newsletter.
The most obvious explanation for why we’re now living in Copenhagen is that my husband got a job here. But really, this goes back almost two decades. I never expected to study abroad when I was in college, but then I met my husband who had recently studied in Copenhagen, and the idea of spending a lot of time in a completely different country seemed like an incredible country. And that’s how I found myself in a cool little room in a dorm that had won prizes for its design.
I loved the time I spent studying abroad in Copenhagen. It was my first time on my own in another country, and it was incredible to live a life with cool design, public transportation, and easy access to a lot of other countries in Europe. It was also just chill in a way that was different to the kind of California chill I had been living in at the time. Danes (and I guess Scandinavians more generally) have a reputation for being stand-offish, but my experience was that they were kind and reserved in a way that I actually find kind of similar to New England.
Since then, Copenhagen has always been on the list of places we thought would be cool to live, but it always felt hypothetical. We spent a few months in Oslo in 2022, and while that’s not quite Copenhagen, it did reaffirm the idea that living in a place that is functional and easy to navigate was appealing. So when the opportunity came up for my husband to work at the same university we studied abroad at, it felt like a pretty clear opportunity we should take. My work is flexible and mobile, and working with my US-based people from a European time zone has its advantages.
So in some ways, the decision has been very easy. After all, this is a city we’ve loved for so long. And, you know, the US is a bit of a mixed bag right now. But the idea of moving abroad is so different from actually doing it. Both my parents and my in-laws immigrated from other countries to the US, so we’ve had some sense of what an immense decision it was for them and how it shaped us as their kids. While we are making this transition with a lot of advantages and privileges that our parents didn't have, it still raised a lot of questions about what we’re signing up for ourselves and for our son.
There’s a huge difference between romanticizing a city you lived in when you turned 20, and a city you plan to uproot everything for when you’re in your late 30s. One of the things that reassured me was Copenhagen's reputation as being a great place for kids to grow up. And the idea of living in a country with a strong social safety net, where we wouldn’t need to have a car, where we would have the opportunity to learn a new language—those were all deeply appealing.
But it’s easy for this to cascade into a lot of familiar tropes about life in American cities (all cons) versus life in European cities (all pros), which I find really uncomfortable. It feels very dismissive about why the US is the way it is and the parts that are so good, and it also often over-romanticizes European life. Western Massachusetts is a great place to raise kids too, and I would have loved for my son to keep growing up there with the friends that we had made there. And making this move is going to require us to approach our thinking around finances, government, and community in new ways. It's not like we move here and suddenly live in hygge paradise. But I'm also excited to figure out how our choices and lives will shift in this new context.
