Someone recently told me, “You can still love your home country while settling in another nation with better prospects.”
It struck me like a well-meaning but confused confession:
“I still love my ex-girlfriend more than my wife.”
Let’s be honest. That’s not how love works — not in relationships, and certainly not in matters of nationhood.
Moving to another country for better opportunities — education, healthcare, freedom, or simply peace — is entirely reasonable. It’s often necessary. But let’s not wrap it up in the warm blanket of patriotic love. Let’s call it what it is: pragmatism. Survival. Sometimes, ambition.
There’s nothing wrong with that. But pretending it’s a kind of noble loyalty? That’s where the story gets shaky.
The Illusion of Dual Affection
If someone says they love their ex more than their current partner, we question their commitment. We see a mismatch between feeling and action. And yet, in the realm of geopolitics and identity, we grant ourselves a strange exception.
We say we “still love” our homeland while we contribute taxes, labor, and creativity to another soil. We say we miss our roots, but we no longer water them.
Is love something that can thrive in absence? Or does it need presence, investment, sacrifice?
Love vs. Nostalgia
Maybe what many feel isn’t love, but nostalgia — a selective, romanticized memory of home. The food, the festivals, the language. But not the broken systems, the corruption, the inequality. Nostalgia is easy. Love, as anyone in a long-term relationship will tell you, is hard.
If you truly love your homeland, you don’t abandon it at its worst. You fight for it. You grow with it. You give back.
Leaving isn’t betrayal — but calling it “love” might be a convenient lie we tell ourselves to sleep better at night.
A Better Truth
Here’s a more honest take:
“I left my homeland because it couldn’t give me what I needed. But I carry a deep connection to it, one that still shapes who I am.”
That’s not love in the romantic sense. It’s more like familial affection. Maybe even grief.
And that’s okay.
Because love doesn’t always mean staying.
But it should at least mean telling the truth — to yourself, and to your homeland.