The accept-anything phase
After something ends badly, your standards drop with your self-worth. You stay in things you'd now leave in a week. Abroad it lasts longer, because nobody around you knows what you're normally like.
After my first real relationship ended, I spent a couple of years willing to accept almost anything. Not consciously. It just felt like I had less to offer, so less had to be enough.
The next relationship was built on exactly that. Looking back, the verdict is easy. I'd walk away faster than I'd even think about it.
That clarity took years to arrive. At the time it looked like patience.
Being abroad stretched this out. At home there's friction that corrects you. A friend who's known you ten years says the thing nobody else will. Your family notices you've gone quiet.
Abroad, none of that exists at first. Nobody has a baseline for you. Whoever you're being right now is simply who you are, because there's no earlier version for anyone to compare against.
That's the real cost of arriving with low self-worth. Not the loneliness. The missing mirror.
Which is why the fix isn't dating advice. It's having people around who knew you before, or who've been around long enough to notice when you drift.