Penelope MyszkaThe number of adults who say they have no close friends at all has quadrupled since 1990.
For those of us who’ve also moved country, culture, or language on top of that, the odds can feel stacked even higher.
We are social beings, no doubt there. From the very beginning, our nervous systems are wired to seek connection. It’s how we survived, how we regulated, how we made sense of the world.
So why, as adults, does something as basic as making a friend suddenly feel like one of the hardest things we do?
Part of the answer is generational and global.
With more third culture kids, more remote work, more people relocating for love, opportunity, or necessity, the experience of starting over socially (more than once, sometimes many times) is much more common than we tend to acknowledge.
If you’ve moved abroad and find yourself quietly struggling to build a social circle, you are not an outlier. You’re part of a growing, largely unspoken population of adults relearning how to belong.
Moved Abroad and Now Feel Lonely?
There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes with relocation; One that’s easy to minimize, because on paper, life might look full. New city, new job, maybe a new language you’re proud of picking up.
But evenings and weekends can feel strangely empty. Even conversations in new friend groups where they all reminisce of old times you weren’t a part of can make you feel particularly excluded.
This isn’t a personal failing.
It’s a mismatch between how friendship used to form in your life – through proximity, shared history, repetition over years…and how it has to form now, as an adult. Often from scratch, often in a second language, often surrounded by people who already have their circles established.
The Emotional Fallout of the Friendship Gap
When adult friendship doesn’t come easily, it rarely stays contained to the thought that “I wish I had more friends.” It absolutely presents itself through other feelings and tends to spread into other areas of life.
Struggling to make friends as an adult can sometimes look like this:
- Loneliness that shows up even when you’re technically around people. This also presents very closely to understanding one’s sense of belonging.
- Shame or embarrassment, a quiet sense that you should have this figured out by now, and a hope that others don’t notice. This often comes from internalizing the difficulty as a personal failing rather than a common experience.
- Comparison to the friendships you had before, which can make anything new feel lesser by default. This can show up as being overlycritical about their behaviors, responses to you, or even conversation topics.
- A sense of unfulfillment, even when other parts of your life (career, partner, city) are going well. This is where many realize the value of community they had that didn’t seem obvious before, it was just already there.
- Second-guessing the move itself, especially questions like “Why did I even do this” or “Was this really worth it?” when feeling particularly frustrated.
- Nostalgia and homesickness, sometimes for a version of “home” that’s more about familiarity than the place itself, often it can even be the things you used to complain about.
- Downplaying the connections you do have, you find yourself questioning how close you really are: Would they pick up if you called at midnight? Would you actually confide in them, or just make plans over coffee?
- Fatigue from repetition, the emotional tax of starting over again and again: the same introductions, the same small talk about where you’re from and how you’re liking the new country, on a loop with every new person you meet.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s worth naming clearly: this is a common and well-documented part of the expat and immigrant experience. It doesn’t mean something is wrong with you, or with the decision to leave.
How to Actually Make Friends as an Adult
There’s no shortcut that replicates childhood. No shared classroom, no decade of proximity to fall back on, and no endless activities forcing you around other peers.
But don’t fret, there are things that reliably work:
1. Show up in the same place, repeatedly, at the same time.
Familiarity is built through repetition, not intensity. A weekly class, a regular café, the same run club; Showing up once a week for months does more than one big outing ever will.
And it’s undeniable: people are more responsive and approachable toward a familiar face than a stranger, even before a real conversation has happened. That familiarity does some of the social work for you, quietly, before you’ve said much at all.
2. Choose activities you’d enjoy even alone.
Friendship formed around a shared, genuine interest tends to be more durable. Doing something you actually like also gives you an invisible kind of reinforcement that comes from doing something you’re secure in, rather than performing for the sake of being social.
It also gives everyone a built-in icebreaker… something to talk about that isn’t forced small talk. And there’s an added bonus: you’re not solely dependent on the social outcome to make the time worthwhile.
3. Keep an eye out for recurring events, not just one-off ones
Communities, language exchanges, expat meetups, hobby groups: Recurrence is what turns “we met once” into “we know each other.”
It also does something subtler: showing up to the same event over time means you start to know who to expect, not just where to be. Familiar faces become predictable ones, which is often the first quiet step toward feeling like you belong somewhere, rather than just visiting it.
4. Prepare yourself for rejection, or more often, non-response.
This is one of the most common friendship deterrents I hear about. A slow reply, or none at all, usually isn’t personal. Most adults are juggling full lives and simply don’t have the bandwidth to invest in every new connection right away.
This isn’t about relying on people who aren’t available to you, or lowering what you expect from a connection. It’s about staying flexible with your expectations early on, before you know what someone is actually able to give.
5. Maintain the relationship over time.
Consistency matters more than any single interaction. Adult friendships are built the way trust is built anywhere: slowly, through repeated small moments, not one deep conversation (although those definitely help).
Even if it feels slow, and even if it moves through seasons of closeness and distance, there’s a weight to longevity that only shows up later. It’s the kind of trust that can’t be rushed into existence, only accumulated.
6. Say yes more than feels natural.
The outing you wouldn’t normally consider is often exactly where connection happens. New friendships tend to form at the edges of your comfort zone, not the center of it.
Don’t overextend yourself, but if community and friendship are values you hold, positioning yourself to increase your chances is a meaningful, committed action in itself.
Are We Getting in Our Own Way?
It’s easy to place the difficulty entirely outside ourselves. Be real, have you said any of the following to yourself when feeling frustrated about friendships abroad?
- The other person didn’t text back
- The group already felt closed
- The culture is harder to break and uninviting
All of that can be true. But it’s also worth turning the lens inward, gently, without judgment:
What part do I play in this too?
Fear often shows up first, and quietly. The fear of being rejected again, of investing and being let down, of appearing too eager or too needy. So we hold back. We wait for the other person to reach out first, we protect ourselves by not fully showing up.
It feels safer, but it also means the connection never gets the chance to build.
Insecurity plays a similar role. We assume we’re not interesting or funny enough, or not worth someone else’s time… and we act accordingly, pulling back before anyone’s actually rejected us.
That rejection we’re bracing for has already happened, just internally, before it was ever tested externally.
And then there’s a subtler, more specific kind of self-sabotage that shows up for people who’ve moved abroad: “I’ll probably leave eventually anyway, so what’s the point?”
It sounds practical, even protective. The reality is it turns every potential friendship into a cost-benefit calculation before it’s had a chance to become anything.
You can imagine it becomes self-fulfilling at some point. The less we invest, the lonelier we feel, the more that loneliness becomes a reason to consider leaving… which “confirms” the original belief that it wasn’t worth investing in the first place.
None of this is about blame. These patterns are usually protective. They developed for a reason, often long before the move abroad.
But naming them is what makes it possible to choose differently: to reach out first, to let someone see that you’d like to keep seeing them, to invest in something even knowing it might not be permanent.
What Else to Keep in Mind
A few gentler reminders, for the moments this feels discouraging:
- Try not to compare new friendships to old ones. They won’t feel the same, and that’s not necessarily a loss, it’s a difference. You’re in a different life stage now, and the friendships that fit this stage will look different too.
- Try not to internalize the outcome as a reflection of your worth. If someone doesn’t reciprocate the way you’d hoped, it often has more to do with their own capacity and circumstances than with you.
- Be honest with yourself about what’s actually happening. Sometimes there are real communication or cultural gaps worth naming and working through, not everything is explained by “it’s just hard being new.”
- Notice what you’re missing. Pay attention to the specific shape of the loneliness. Is it deep conversation? Shared history? Physical closeness? That can often be a clue to what you value most, and worth giving space for rather than pushing away.
You’re Not Alone in This
Making friends as an adult abroad is genuinely harder. Not because something is wrong with you, but because the conditions that used to build friendship automatically (time, proximity, shared history) now require intention and repeated effort. That’s a real adjustment, not a personal shortcoming.
If this feeling of loneliness or disconnection has been sitting with you for a while, it can help to talk it through with a therapist who understands the specific experience of starting over in a new country.
Therapy for expats and immigrants is a space to make sense of the transition, the grief that can come with it, and how to build a life (and a social world) that actually feels like yours.
You don’t have to figure this out alone.
If you’re ready to explore what’s holding you back, book a free consultation today!