Making Friends as an Adult Expat and Why it’s so Difficult
You’re at a work event, a Dutch language class, a neighbour’s party, or maybe even a meetup event for expats. The conversations are pleasant and you did your best to be engaged, yet when you leave, you feel strangely alone.
If this sounds familiar, this post is for you.
You’re not alone in feeling alone
We’re living through a loneliness epidemic where feeling alone or isolated has sadly become a common experience for many people. So much so that the World Health Organization declared loneliness a global public health concern.
According to their research, around 1 in 6 people worldwide experience loneliness, and this has serious impacts on health, wellbeing and lifespan.
A poll by the American Psychiatric Association found that young and middle-aged adults were the most likely to experience feelings of loneliness, which might surprise some people, as it is often seen as a problem associated with later life.
Something has changed in the way we connect
What’s a bit paradoxical about this loneliness epidemic is that we’ve never had more access to other people than we do now. We can see what our friends are having for dinner, even when they’re on a different continent, and watch strangers share their opinions and document their lives. Yet many of us feel more disconnected than ever. We’re often consuming highly curated versions of people’s lives while carrying the things that don’t make it onto our feeds or messages, like our doubts, worries and failures, on our own.
School and university naturally facilitate friendships through shared physical spaces, regularity and time. In these environments, you might not have had to try so hard. In contrast, adult life often lacks the spaces and time for friendships to form, especially with many people now working remotely or hybrid. Everyone is busy, and many of us have tightly scheduled calendars with little room for spontaneous connection, even though that’s often when connection is most needed. Not three weeks from now when there happens to be space in the diary, but in the moment.
In a culture that encourages us to maximise our time and squeeze as much value as possible from it, the bar for socialising can become surprisingly high. We start asking whether an event is worth it, productive enough, or likely to lead somewhere. In trying to make connection efficient, we can sometimes end up missing each other altogether.
So if you’re finding making friends as an adult hard, it’s not because there’s something wrong with you or you're not trying. The conditions for making adult friendships are harder than they’ve ever been and for expats, there are additional challenges to this.
The Expat Layer
Trying to make friends as an adult expat comes with additional complexities, including:
Cultural gaps: not only language barriers but things like humour, expressions, references and shared cultural phenomena (TV shows, complaints about something specific to that country like the “belastingdienst” and their lovely blue envelopes). The things that often bond people quickly don’t always translate well.
Locals often already have full lives: they have established friend groups and often family commitments. So while they might be warm and friendly, they might not take it further than that, as they don’t have room or need for new friendships. It can help not to take this personally. Often, it's a situational reality rather than a reflection of you.
The transient nature of Expat lives: many expats, whether yourself or those you meet, will only stay in a place for a period of time before moving on. This can create some ambivalence about investing time and emotional energy into new relationships.
Grieving the social life you left behind: this often goes unacknowledged, but the deep, meaningful friendships that you built over years are not easily replaced. It’s a loss to leave behind people who know you inside out and have been there through thick and thin. Acknowledging that loss can sometimes make more space for new connections to emerge.
Some ideas for how to make friends as an (Expat) adult
Put yourself where friendship can grow
It can be difficult to form friendships from one-off social events and even harder from single events that you don’t enjoy, like a pub crawl when you don’t like drinking. Consider looking for a recurring activity you can do alongside other people that you enjoy. Not only does the repeated contact give you the time to naturally build the relationship, but having a shared interest means that there’s at least one thing you already have in common.
Some options:
Sports clubs, running groups, or gym classes
Language classes, creative workshops like pottery, cooking or knitting.
Boardgame cafes often have weekly or monthly recurring events, book clubs and quiz nights
Volunteering
Follow through
You’ve met some you like - great! Now it’s important to do something with it, whether that’s sending a follow-up message or suggesting meeting up for coffee. Many people wait for the other person to make the first move, so if you’re both waiting, chances are nothing will happen.
Accept that it takes time and not everyone will become a friend
You won’t click with everyone and not everyone will click with you. While it might be painful to receive a rejection or not hear back, it’s better to know early on rather than after you’ve invested a lot of time into building that relationship. Similarly, you’ll meet people who want more from you than you want to give, and it’s ok to communicate that.
Also, making friends takes time, which is easy to forget when you’ve just moved country and everything feels urgent. From a Gestalt therapy perspective, meaningful relationships develop through repeated moments of genuine contact. When we try to force or rush this process, it can sometimes get in the way of the very connection we are hoping to create.
Create some scaffolding
Friendships in adulthood often need a structure to grow in, whether that’s a weekly coffee date, a regular dog walk or a monthly dinner. Spontaneity might not be realistic, so building something into the rhythm of daily life makes it more likely that things will happen. Also, repeated, low-pressure time together makes great ground for friendships to take root.
Be where your feet are
Understand how you are using your phone. Sometimes scrolling through other people’s lives or exchanging long voice notes with friends back home takes you away from building relationships locally. This makes sense, as these things are often much easier and more accessible than the local alternative, which feels effortful and uncertain. But that might mean that you remain disconnected in the place you live.
The Takeaway
Making friends as an adult is surprisingly hard. Making friends as an expat adult is harder still.
In a world where we are more connected and reachable than before, many people find themselves increasingly alone and wondering if there’s something wrong with them. Often, when you’re struggling to build meaningful friendships abroad, it reflects the realities of adult life, migration and modern culture - not a personal shortcoming.
Having said that, it’s not impossible to make friends as an (expat) adult; it just takes time, initiative and perseverance. Eventually, the repeated contact and small moments of genuine connection can blossom into meaningful friendships.