Sometimes I like to open women's forums, not to spy on any secrets or assert myself, but simply because life is pulsating there. There is no diplomacy there. They immediately sound the alarm there, and at the same time they slap you in the face, informs Ukr.Media.
Someone, apparently from a safe European distance, throws this sophisticated grenade into the crowd: they say, girls, why are you sitting there? There's no future, grab the children and go after the opportunities, don't hold on to your men.
I look at this and understand: it will begin now… And it begins.
Reading these battles, I involuntarily try on the situation for myself and my friends. We were once sold the idea for a long time that moving is an automatic upgrade of fate. You packed your suitcase, crossed the border, and here you are standing in a sunny European town, drinking a macchiato, while your children chatter freely in three languages and prepare to enter Oxford.
But the reality turned out to be a little more complicated and much dirtier.
On one side of the ring are those who left.
They broadcast a story about security. But between the lines, in the caustic comments about “January 2027” (when they are supposed to review certain paragraphs and payments), their own, deep and unrecognized fear is revealed. The fear that they have become cogs in someone else’s system. Where you have to pay horse taxes, where you are treated as cheap labor, and where the most you can do without a confirmed diploma and fluent language skills is to clean public toilets or take care of old Germans. Although, even those old people will not be allowed in without a special course. European bureaucracy is a strict lady.
On the other hand, those who remained.
Their argument is terribly clear to me, a 44-year-old man who has long stopped believing in fairy tales about heaven on earth.
Because it's not just about men. Or rather, it's not always about them. It's about the basic, banal human comfort that you've invested years in. Women write about their favorite apartments, cats, dachas, remote work with a normal salary. They write about their beautician and favorite gym. And I understand them perfectly. At a certain age, you just don't want to trade your cozy bedroom for a bed in a German dormitory, where you'll have to share space with a crowd of strangers. You're just too lazy to start everything from scratch. Too lazy to integrate, learn the language, get used to a different mentality. And this laziness is a completely normal, healthy protective reaction of the psyche.
And the children… Oh, this eternal argument about “a better future for children”. You read the stories of those who returned, and your hair stands on end. We are used to thinking that there is complete tolerance there. But in practice it turns out that in a good German gymnasium, 12-year-old majors can drive a boy from Ukraine to a nervous breakdown because he is wearing sneakers from a cheap mass market, not branded ones. Or that a child is driven into depression simply because he “came here”. And sometimes the most painful bites are from their own people – the same traumatized teenagers who fled the war.
And medicine. This European medical paradise, where you wait months to see a specialist. One of the commentators writes how a child with Crohn's disease was treated until he was disabled and had another autoimmune disease, simply because they were waiting in line for a hospital. Against this background, our ability to write a telegram to a pediatrician at ten o'clock in the evening seems like some unattainable luxury for the entire civilized world.
But the most poignant thing about all this is the children who simply refuse to go. A sixteen-year-old teenager who tells his mother: “I won't go anywhere, even if you drag me.” Or a four-year-old in safe Germany who packs his little backpack every day because he wants to go home. To his dad. And he starts having panic attacks at the very thought of being left there without a father. At this point, all theories about a “bright European future” are shattered by a child's tantrum in a strange room. Because no German or Spanish school can replace a child with a full-fledged family and a sense of place.
This forum shit (let's call a spade a spade) isn't really about where it's better to live. It's about how we're all trying to justify our choices right now so we don't go crazy.
Those who left convince themselves that they saved their children and now have to endure loneliness, strangers, and physical labor for the sake of a noble cause. And those who stayed cling to their familiar walls and the fact that under the missiles, but at home, it's better.
No one knows who is right. Life is too unpredictable. Today you buy your child a ticket to a bright European tomorrow, and in ten years they may give you a bill for growing up without a father in a foreign language environment. Or vice versa – they will thank you. And those who stayed can raise geniuses here, or they can face the fact that what they were running away from has caught up with them.
We're all just pointing our fingers at the sky. And the only thing that really keeps people going anywhere is the illusion that they have control over anything in their lives.
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Bearded Pike 🇪🇺 There. Only safety! 03/12/2026 10:12 Among our friends and acquaintances with their wives, of those who left, there are already a lot of those who have divorced. She is there with the children, and he is here, fighting (or not – it doesn't matter). There are those who divorced and after 3-4 years want to return back, home … but there is nowhere to return – because the ex-husband has already married his sister there, during the war. There are those who have quarreled with relatives and friends (and I myself have long, almost with disgust, treated some of those who left), who left and even stopped writing in Telegram in the morning, after the crazy combined air attacks, to ask if we are safe or not. Yes, we are still not sure whether we did the right thing by staying (my wife and son), by not pushing our son abroad, but by making an effort to get him into a university in Ukraine. The war really divided us a lot, so much so that we don't even want those “imported” people to come back. And why are they needed here, after all? – we've been living without this “ballast” for 4 years, so we'll get used to it without them later + Reply Night Guy 🤷♀️ Looking for a third chair 03/12/2026 10:09 AM When they tell me that I have to wait a very long time to see a doctor, I go to a private one, and then with his recommendations I visit a family one. Of course, it costs “a little” more, but health is an opportunity to live and work. So our Ukrainian thrifty nature, saving money to repair the roof on the Ukrainian hut, fails in such cases. If you want to live, learn to spin + Reply