When the opportunity to move to Houston came up through a job transfer, it wasn’t an easy choice. I had just recently gotten married, moved out, and was settling into newlywed life. Deciding to leave family, friends, and the city I’d called home for years was hard. But sometimes, when an opportunity presents itself, you have to take a risk and trust that it will work out.
So we packed up our 700-square-foot apartment in Toronto and set off to start a new life in Houston. When we first started looking for apartments here, the leasing agent asked us what we were looking for in terms of size. We told him we were coming from 700 square feet, so at least that. He laughed and said that wouldn’t be a problem. And he wasn’t kidding.
One of the first things you notice in Houston, and in Texas in general, is that everything is just bigger. Streets, houses, parking spaces… even grocery stores feel more expansive. Coming from Toronto where space is something you negotiate with, it took some getting used to. But in a good way, the kind of adjustment that slowly starts to feel like a quiet upgrade.
The city itself has surprised me more than I expected. I came in with an open mind but also a lot of unknowns, not really knowing what Houston would feel like day to day. What I’ve found is that it’s a city with a lot going on beneath the surface. The food scene is genuinely incredible, the green spaces are more abundant than I anticipated, and there’s a warmth to the people here that made the transition feel a little less daunting than it could have been.
That said, moving to a new city as a newlywed comes with its own particular mix of emotions. You’re navigating a new place while also figuring out what home looks like together for the first time. There were moments in those early weeks where everything felt unfamiliar all at once, the neighbourhood, the roads, the grocery store layout, the weather. It’s a lot to adjust to, and I think it’s okay to admit that.
But there’s also something really special about building something new together from scratch. Finding your first local coffee shop, figuring out which neighbourhood feels like yours, slowly turning an unfamiliar city into something that starts to feel like home. Houston is different from anything I’ve known, but we’re making it ours, one small moment at a time.
If you’re considering a big move or are in the middle of one right now, I hope this is a small reminder that the adjustment period is normal and that it does get easier. And if you’re curious about what the next few months looked like for us, I wrote about that too in my post about settling into Houston.
