Why Making Friends Abroad Is Hard (And How to Actually Do It)

You pictured it differently, didn't you?

You imagined yourself at a long dinner table somewhere, laughing with a mix of locals and fellow travelers, the kind of effortless international friendships that look great in photos and feel even better in real life. You'd belong everywhere, right? That's kind of the whole point.

And then you moved abroad, and three months in, you realized that you've had approximately forty pleasant conversations with people you'll probably never see again — and zero friends.

Welcome to one of the most universal and least-discussed struggles of expat life.

The Transient Friendship Trap

Expat social circles have a particular rhythm, and once you recognize it, you can't unsee it. Someone arrives. There's a flurry of excitement — new person! — and you make plans, exchange numbers, grab coffee. It's going really well. And then, eight months later, they move on. Or you do.

This cycle repeats often enough that many long-term expats develop what you might call emotional self-protection. They stay friendly but not close. They show up to the group dinners without really investing. It's not coldness — it's self-preservation. Getting close to people who might leave (or who you might leave) is emotionally expensive, and after a few rounds of it, the instinct is to stop paying.

The trap is that this strategy, while understandable, guarantees the loneliness it's trying to prevent.

Local Friendships Are Worth the Effort — But They're Different

A lot of expats default to other expats for social connection, and that's not wrong. Shared experience is a powerful bonding agent. But limiting yourself to the expat bubble means missing out on the richest part of living somewhere new: actually knowing the people who live there.

Building friendships with locals is slower. It often is. In many cultures — Japan, Germany, France, even parts of Latin America — friendship develops over a much longer timeline than Americans are used to. In the US, we tend to fast-track intimacy: deep conversation on the first hangout, vulnerability within weeks. That pace can read as overwhelming or even inappropriate in other cultural contexts.

This isn't a flaw in either approach. It's just different. The expat who gets frustrated that their Spanish coworkers won't "open up" may be misreading warmth that's being offered in a different language — a shared meal, an invitation to a family event, a small act of help that means more than it looks like.

Pay attention to how connection is expressed where you are, not just how you're used to expressing it.

Stop Networking, Start Showing Up Consistently

Every expat eventually discovers the Facebook group, the Meetup event, the expat happy hour. These are fine. They're starting points. But they're not where real friendships happen — they're where acquaintances are made.

Real friendship, everywhere in the world, tends to happen through repeated, low-stakes contact. The same Tuesday morning language class. The running club that meets every Saturday. The volunteer shift you do every other week. The book club where you see the same six people for months.

Consistency is the ingredient that most expat social strategies are missing. One-off events create contacts. Regular rituals create friends.

This also means committing to something before you feel motivated to. The motivation comes after the habit, not before it. Show up even when you're tired. Show up even when you'd rather stay home and watch something familiar. The people who become your people are usually the ones you kept showing up around.

The Expat Who Belongs Everywhere (And Nowhere)

There's a particular identity challenge that long-term expats face: after a few years abroad, you no longer quite fit back home, but you're not fully local either. You exist in a kind of permanent in-between.

This can feel like a loss. But it's also, if you let it be, a kind of freedom.

Some of the deepest expat friendships form between people who recognize this condition in each other — the third-culture kids, the serial relocators, the people who've lived in four countries and feel at home in airports. There's a particular understanding between people who've all chosen to live outside the obvious path, and it can create a bond that transcends geography.

These friendships often survive distance better than you'd expect, because they were never dependent on proximity to begin with.

Practical Moves That Actually Help

Beyond the philosophy, here are some concrete things that work:

Learn the language, even badly. Nothing signals genuine interest in a place like trying to speak its language. Even clumsy, mistake-filled attempts open doors that perfect English never will. People are remarkably forgiving of bad grammar when the effort is sincere.

Join something skill-based. A pottery class, a choir, a local sports league, a cooking workshop. Shared activity sidesteps the awkwardness of pure socializing and gives you something to talk about other than where you're from and how long you've been here.

Be the one who initiates. Everybody is waiting for someone else to make the first move. Be that person. Suggest the follow-up coffee. Organize the group dinner. Yes, sometimes it won't land. That's fine. The people who appreciate the initiative are the ones worth knowing anyway.

Give it a real timeline. Research on social connection suggests it takes roughly 50 hours of time with someone to move from acquaintance to casual friend, and 200 hours to develop a close friendship. That's not a weekend — that's months of consistent contact. Give yourself, and the people around you, that kind of time.

You Don't Have to Belong Everywhere at Once

The site's tagline — belong everywhere — is aspirational, and it's real. But belonging doesn't happen all at once, and it doesn't happen without showing up imperfectly, repeatedly, over time.

The loneliness of early expat life is almost universal. It doesn't mean you made the wrong choice. It means you're in the part of the story that comes before the friendships, not the part that comes after.

Keep going. Your people are out there. They're probably just as lonely as you are right now, waiting for someone to show up consistently enough to become a friend.