How to Make Friends Abroad When You're Not 22

What follows is how I understand and approach this issue in my work with clients.

Therapy for the loneliness of making friends abroad as an adult. An expat counselor understands that the problem isn’t social skills. It’s the loss of effortless connection.

The last time making friends was easy, you probably didn't notice it happening. You sat next to someone in a lecture hall, or shared an office, or ended up at the same bar three Friday nights in a row. At some point you just... were friends. You didn't strategize. You didn't "put yourself out there." It happened because the structure of your life made it happen: repeated contact, shared context, and enough unstructured time for something real to take root.

None of those conditions exist anymore. And every piece of advice you've read about making friends abroad seems to have been written by someone who either hasn't tried it as a 35-year-old with a job and maybe kids, or who has a completely different definition of friendship than you do.

Why this is a structural problem, not a personality problem

You're not bad at making friends. You're trying to do something that the architecture of adult expat life is specifically engineered to prevent.

Think about what friendship actually requires. Not acquaintanceship (you can get that anywhere) but the real thing. It requires repeated, unplanned contact over time. It requires shared vulnerability. Not the dramatic kind, just the gradual willingness to let someone see you when you're not performing your best self. And it requires continuity. The knowledge that this person will still be here next month.

Now think about expat life. Contact is planned, not organic. Everyone is performing, because everyone is slightly disoriented and compensating for it. And continuity is a joke. People rotate in and out on two-year contracts like a carousel that never stops long enough for anyone to get off together.

You're not failing at friendship. You're attempting friendship in conditions that are hostile to it.

The grief you haven't processed

What I think is actually going on underneath the frustration: you're not just trying to make new friends. You're mourning old ones. And those are two very different psychological operations that are difficult to run simultaneously.

The friends you had at home, the ones who knew your backstory, who could read your face, who you didn't have to explain yourself to, those relationships were built on years of shared experience that can't be replicated at a meetup. When you go to an expat event and feel that kind of loneliness (surrounded by friendly people and yet invisible) what you're feeling isn't social anxiety. It's grief. The gap between what you had and what's available.

And because nobody frames it as grief, because it's supposed to be an adventure, because you're supposed to be making the most of it: the grief goes underground. It shows up as irritability, as social exhaustion, as a creeping suspicion that maybe you're just not a "people person" anymore. You start turning down invitations. You tell yourself you prefer staying home. And slowly, the very thing you need most (connection) becomes the thing you avoid.

What most advice gets wrong

"Join a club." "Go to meetups." "Take a cooking class." "Use Bumble BFF." You've heard it. Maybe you've tried it. And maybe you walked away from each attempt feeling worse than before. Not because the events were bad, but because the events were fine, and fine was somehow worse than terrible.

Here's why: an event is a performance space. You show up, you're "on" for two hours, you have pleasant conversations with people you'll never see again, and you go home. Nothing accumulates. Nothing builds. It's social calories with no nutritional value.

What actually builds friendship is the opposite of an event. It's a context. A recurring structure where you see the same people, doing the same thing, often enough that the performance becomes unsustainable and something real starts leaking through. A weekly language class. A regular running group. A co-working space you go to on the same days. The context does the heavy lifting that, when you were 22, was done by the dormitory hallway and the campus bar.

The difference isn't trivial. Events create acquaintances. Contexts create the conditions for friendship. The friendship itself still requires something more.

The thing nobody wants to do

At some point, you have to do the slightly frightening thing: you have to let someone see you before you're ready.

Not a trauma dump, not a breakdown at the dinner table. Just a moment of honesty. "I'm actually finding it really hard here." "I miss my friends back home more than I expected." "I don't know what I'm doing most of the time." These are small sentences that feel enormous to say, because they violate the expat social contract, which is that everyone pretends to be having a better time than they are.

But when you say them, something shifts: the other person exhales. Because they've been carrying the same thing. And in that exhale (that tiny moment of mutual recognition) something shifts. You go from two people being pleasant at each other to two people who have told each other one true thing. That's not friendship yet. But it's the first brick.

I've heard clients describe this moment dozens of times, and it's always the same: "I didn't plan to say it. It just came out. And then they said 'oh my god, me too,' and suddenly the whole evening was different." It's never the planned vulnerability that works. It's the accidental honesty that slips through when the performance cracks.

The part that's actually about you

Sometimes the difficulty making friends abroad isn't really about abroad. Sometimes abroad just removed the structures that were doing the work for you, and now you're discovering that you don't actually know how you make friends. That you never had to learn, because the contexts did it for you.

And sometimes what looks like difficulty making friends is actually difficulty with intimacy. A pattern of keeping people at a certain distance (close enough to be pleasant, far enough to be safe) that worked fine at home, where you had enough people at that distance to feel socially full, but doesn't work here, where the pool is smaller and the stakes feel higher.

If that sounds right, it's not something a meetup is going to fix. It's something older and deeper, a pattern that probably predates the move, and it might be worth looking at with someone who can help you see it clearly.

Aaron Platt, MA (Counseling, La Salle; Sociology, UC Berkeley) is a therapist offering individual and couples therapy in English to clients worldwide. His psychodynamic approach focuses on the patterns that keep people stuck, not the surface symptoms, but the underlying structure.

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