The Hardest Part of Moving Abroad Isn’t the Paperwork: Expats and Remote Workers on Making Friends From Scratch
You beat the consulate queues. You translated tax documents, showed bank statements four times over, and finally signed a lease that did not demand a year of cash upfront. You won. Then the moving van rumbles away, the boxes are emptied, and the front door swings shut. Total silence. You sit on the rug, look down at your screen, and realize something unsettling: you have not exchanged an informal sentence with another human being in four straight days. Yet nobody warns you about the eerie quiet that sets in once the dust settles.
How Common Is This Struggle?
More common than most people admit. InterNations surveys expats every year, and its 2020 friendship ranking drew on answers from about 15,000 people in 181 countries. It found that 44 percent of expats in Germany find it difficult to make new friends, compared to 33 percent globally.
Some places are tougher still. In a 2016 survey, 68 percent of expats in Denmark reported difficulty making local friends. In the Netherlands, 51 percent of expats belonged to a friendship group of other expats, against 35 percent globally, and only 11 percent were mainly friends with locals.
Why Loneliness Abroad Feels Different
Back home, people know your story. They know you always bring too much food and hate karaoke. In a new country you start from zero, with a blank reputation and a lot of explaining ahead.
That reset feels freeing for about a week. After that, it’s tiring. Small talk takes real effort in a second language, and plenty of people quietly stop trying.
Why Adult Friendship Is Harder Than Childhood Friendship
At school, friends happened by accident. Same classroom, same bus, same lunch table, every day for years. Adult life removes all of that, and a new country strips away even the few routines you had.
Add a language gap. Add jokes that land flat, and unwritten rules about when it’s polite to invite someone home. In some places a colleague stays a colleague forever, and you only learn that after a few invitations you probably shouldn’t have sent.
Remote Workers Get Hit Twice
An expat with an office at least gets coworkers. A remote worker gets a laptop. Now move that person to a country where they know nobody. The laptop looks identical in Lisbon, Bali or Tbilisi. So does the quiet Tuesday afternoon. Then comes the time zone problem: your team logs off just as your new neighbors wake up.
Make Your Workday Work for You
Remote workers have one big advantage: flexible hours. Use them. Book a desk at a coworking space two days a week, even if all you really need is a Wi-Fi password. Work from the same café every Wednesday until the barista learns your order.
Regular faces become familiar faces. Familiar faces turn into hellos, and hellos into coffee invitations. It’s slow and a little boring, which is exactly why it works.
The Expat Bubble Trap
The easiest path is for other foreigners. Shared language, shared confusion over bin collection days, instant understanding. Nothing wrong with that.
The catch? Expat circles churn. Someone’s contract ends, someone’s visa runs out, and your closest friend is back in Toronto within a year. Locals take longer to get to know, but they tend to stay. They also know which dentist is good, what a fair rent looks like and where the Sunday market really starts.
How Long Does a Real Friendship Take?
Longer than you hoped. A widely quoted 2018 study by communication researcher Jeffrey Hall estimated that it takes roughly 50 hours together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, and more than 200 hours to become a close one.
Five Small Habits That Beat Big Plans
Forget the grand “I’ll meet everyone” plan. Consistency wins. Try these:
- Pick one weekly activity and keep it for three months: same café, same climbing gym, same language class.
- Say yes to the awkward invitation, even when your couch looks better.
- Speak the local language badly and out loud. Effort gets noticed.
- Send the second message. Most people wait to be asked.
- Host something tiny. Soup for four beats a party for forty.
Where Online Conversation Fits In
The loneliest hours are rarely during the day. They arrive around nine in the evening, when work is finished, the streets are dark and your family back home may already be asleep. That gap is where a service like Hey Chatrix can help. It offers private one-on-one video chats with real people, runs in a regular browser on desktop and mobile, needs no download and is free to join.
Treat it as company and practice, not a replacement for the neighbor who’ll water your plants. Talk through the language you’re learning. Compare notes on how strange your new city is. Get used to starting a conversation with a stranger again, because that muscle weakens after a few quiet months. And since you choose what to share, it suits people who like to keep their privacy intact in a new place.
Give Yourself Permission to Be Slow
Social energy runs out. Some weeks you’ll skip the meetup and watch a series in your own language, and that’s fine. Homesickness isn’t failure. It’s proof you cared about what you left.
Keep one rule, though: don’t let two weeks pass without a real conversation with another human. Face to face when possible, on video when not.
The Real Checklist
Paperwork has a deadline. People don’t. You can finish the first in a month, while the second takes a year, sometimes two. Start before you feel ready, and start small. A single regular Thursday somewhere is a better foundation than a perfect plan you never act on.