Settling In
Friendships at home fade through absence rather than through disagreement
The relationships that survive a long stay abroad are rarely the ones that were closest at the moment of leaving, and the difference is mostly about who does the maintaining.
By Tomas Bergqvist3 min read
What a friendship was actually running on
Most adult friendships are held together by circumstance rather than by intent. You worked in the same building, lived on the same street, had children at the same school, went to the same thing on a Wednesday. The affection was real and the machinery that delivered it was proximity.
Moving abroad removes the machinery and leaves the affection, which then has to be supported by something that was never needed before: deliberate, scheduled, effortful contact. Some friendships convert to that easily and some do not, and the ones that fail to convert are not always the ones you would have predicted.
People take this personally at first, on both sides. It is more useful to see it structurally. A friendship that was ninety per cent circumstance is not a false friendship; it is simply one whose supporting conditions have been withdrawn.
Shared context is the thing that actually decays
The mechanism of drift is not forgetting. It is the loss of common ground. At home you knew about the reorganisation at their office, the trouble with the neighbours, the state of their knee. Six months away and every conversation has to begin with an update, which is work, and which makes the conversation feel like a report.
This runs in both directions and the foreign side is worse. Your daily life is now full of things they have no reference for: an office you cannot describe, a bureaucratic saga they cannot follow, a set of people they will never meet. Explaining it is tiring and abridging it makes you sound as though nothing is happening.
The people who manage this well tend to share small things frequently rather than big things occasionally. A photograph of a street, a complaint about a queue, a joke. It maintains context at a low cost, which is exactly what proximity used to do.
The effort is rarely symmetrical, and that is not a verdict
A pattern almost everybody notices is that the person who left does most of the reaching. That is partly circumstance — you have an obvious reason to be in touch and they have a full and unchanged life — and partly that the move is the salient event only for you.
It is worth resisting the urge to test people by waiting. A silence maintained to see who breaks it produces a result that reflects habits rather than affection, and it costs relationships that would have survived a message.
It is equally worth accepting that you can’t maintain everything. Trying to keep twenty friendships alive across a time difference produces twenty thin ones. Choosing six and doing it properly is a better outcome, even though the choosing feels unpleasant.
Time differences and the tyranny of the scheduled call
A large time difference turns spontaneous contact into an appointment, and appointments carry expectations. A conversation that would have taken four minutes standing in a kitchen becomes an hour that has to be worth an hour, which is a heavy demand to place on ordinary friendship.
Lowering the stakes helps. Short calls, voice messages left to be picked up whenever, doing something in parallel rather than facing each other with an agenda. Several people describe a standing weekly call as the single most effective thing they did, precisely because it removed the negotiation.
Families often need a different arrangement from friends, and older relatives in particular may find a fixed time far easier than an unpredictable one. A dull, reliable rhythm beats an intense unpredictable one for almost everybody.
Visits are the real currency and they are unevenly distributed
Who comes to see you tells you something, and it tells you less than people think. Visiting costs money, leave and confidence, and plenty of people who would cross a city will not cross a continent. Some of the friends who never visit will nonetheless be entirely present when you are back.
Being visited is also less restful than it sounds. A guest in your flat for a week is a guest in your one refuge, and the version of your life they see is a curated one because you spend the week showing them things.
The durable finding, reported by a great many people, is that a handful of friendships turn out to be genuinely distance-proof, and that this handful can only be identified by going away. It is a real loss to discover that some relationships were built on a street rather than on anything else, and it is also information you could not have obtained any other way.
Common questions
Why do I always have to be the one who calls?
Usually because the move is the salient event for you and not for them, and because you have an obvious reason to make contact while their life continued unchanged. It is a poor measure of how much they care, and waiting to test it tends to cost friendships unnecessarily.
How do I keep in touch without long scheduled calls?
Frequent small contact maintains shared context far better than occasional long conversations, which end up as mutual reporting. Short messages, photographs and voice notes do most of the work that proximity used to do for free.
Is it normal to lose most of my friendships?
Some thinning is close to universal, because a great many adult friendships are held together by shared circumstance rather than by deliberate effort. The ones that survive are often not the ones you would have predicted, and a few new ones tend to deepen in their place.
Features writer, Globetrotter Talks
Tomas writes the explanatory pieces on arriving, visas & paperwork, money abroad and prefers a plain explanation to a clever one.
