Settling In
A foreign community is a place where everybody is halfway out of the door
The circle of other newcomers that forms so easily in the first months is built on a population that turns over constantly, and the repeated departures are its defining feature.
By Manish Trivedi3 min read
Instant intimacy, and where it comes from
Friendships among foreign residents form at a speed that would be strange at home. People who have known each other for three weeks help each other move flats, sit through each other’s bad days and share information that would ordinarily take years of acquaintance to reach.
The reason is straightforward: everybody involved has an urgent need and no existing network, so the ordinary slow filtering of adult friendship is suspended. Shared difficulty accelerates it further, and there is a great deal of shared difficulty in a first year abroad.
This is genuinely valuable and it should not be sniffed at. It is also built on a foundation that is different from the one at home, and the difference shows up later.
The population changes every year
Communities of this kind are made of people on postings, contracts, courses and stays of defined length, which means a substantial proportion of them leave every year. In some cities the turnover is tied to a season, and the same weeks each summer take a chunk of everybody’s social circle away.
The effect on somebody staying longer is cumulative. The first round of departures is sad. The third is wearing, and people describe a distinct reluctance to invest in newcomers because they can already see the ending.
That reluctance is understandable and it is worth resisting selectively rather than wholesale. The alternative is a long stay spent increasingly alone in a city full of people, which is a worse outcome than a few more goodbyes.
The trap of never leaving the bubble
The second characteristic worth naming is that a foreign community can be entirely self-sufficient. There are enough people, enough events and enough shared language that a person can spend five years somewhere without ever needing to conduct a friendship in the local language.
That is a comfortable arrangement with a real cost. Language progress stalls, understanding of the country stays at the level of anecdote, and the version of the place you experience is the one visible from inside a group of outsiders. People sometimes discover this at the end, when they realise they know a great deal about the community and rather little about the country.
The remedy is not to renounce the community, which would be foolish and lonely. It is to make sure it is not the only thing, and to keep at least one activity that is conducted locally and would exist without you.
Complaint as a social ritual
Every such community develops a shared discourse about the host country, usually affectionate and usually critical, covering the bureaucracy, the customer service, the opening hours and the general unreasonableness of how things are done. Joining in is a bonding mechanism and it is enjoyable.
It also has a corrosive version. A group that spends its time cataloguing what is wrong with a place produces members who are permanently slightly aggrieved, and it filters out the people who might have explained why things are done that way. It also tends to be unkind to the country by people who chose to be in it.
The practical test is whether the conversation ever moves from complaint to curiosity. Groups where somebody eventually says that there is probably a reason for this are much better places to spend a few years than groups where nobody does.
Being the one who stays
People who remain longer than the average acquire a particular role: the person who knows how things work, who helps the new arrivals, who is still there when a family comes back to visit. It is a good role and it involves a specific kind of loss that nobody warns about.
Handling it seems to require two things. A layer of local friendships that do not turn over, which is slower to build and much more durable. And a working attitude to the departures — staying in touch with a few, letting go of most, and not treating either as a failure.
It is worth saying plainly that this is one of the real costs of a long stay, and that it is rarely mentioned in advance. Nobody tells you that the price of an unusually easy first year is a series of goodbyes for as long as you remain, delivered at roughly the same time each year, to people you would in any other circumstance have expected to keep.
Common questions
Why do friendships abroad form so quickly?
Because everybody involved has an urgent need for support and no existing network, which suspends the slow filtering that ordinarily governs adult friendship. Shared difficulty accelerates it further, and a first year abroad supplies plenty.
Should I avoid the foreign community and only make local friends?
That is usually unnecessarily hard and quite lonely, since the community provides real practical help at exactly the point you need it. The useful discipline is to make sure it is not your only source of company, and to keep at least one activity conducted in the local language.
How do I cope with people constantly leaving?
Most long-stayers build a layer of local friendships that don’t turn over, which takes longer and lasts. Beyond that it is a matter of staying in touch with a few, accepting the rest, and continuing to invest in new arrivals despite knowing how it ends.
Reporter, Globetrotter Talks
Manish covers arriving, visas & paperwork, money abroad and the questions readers actually send in and is unreasonably interested in the detail nobody else checks.
