TL;DR: We're moving two hours away from Northwest Ohio to Michigan for a new job. Our families are close but not deeply meaningful to us. We're concerned about our daughter's relationships, but moving feels right for our dream home and lifestyle. How do we feel confident and overcome guilt about leaving these relationships?
Hey, all! My wife (28F), daughter (8F), and I (30M) currently live in Ohio, and due to a new job, we'll need to relocate to Michigan, even if that's right over the line in Michigan (due to it being a remote role).
While looking at various property options throughout the state, some even right on the line, we fell in love with a property two hours away from our hometown, where both of our families live. We can already tell our families are passively unhappy about us moving such a distance, making us waver on whether it is the right decision. Most importantly, we're concerned about whether or not it will negatively impact our daughter and her relationship with them.
We're "close" to our families: we see them 3-4 times a week, and it's been this way for as long as we've been married, about 10 years. However, we don't feel the relationships are truly meaningful. We don't genuinely desire to invest time with them, and we regularly wish they already put in more effort than they do, even though we're all – 4 other siblings on my wife's side – within 10 min of each other. Everyone feels obliged to be together when we are, not because they genuinely want to and put in effort in accordance with it. And, because of that, I worry about whether those relationships are even meaningfully important in the long run to my daughter anyway.
It feels like we've already done this before, too: my first job out of college was a one-hour commute (and I did that for seven years) because we decided to purchase a home in our hometown to "stay close to family." So, objectively it feels like we've regularly deferred the life we've wanted to live to stay close, and we're at a critical point again of making a decision. And, in that time, I feel we've come along way.
Moving feels like the right decision for OUR immediate family, enabling us to live a secluded dream on an expansive property we've yearned for years. And for that, we know that we need to put ourselves first.
My question: how do we feel confident and ward off the guilt of moving away from our families?