By Teresa Cordeiro
Making friends as an adult can be surprisingly difficult. It becomes even more complicated when someone is living away from home, navigating a different culture, speaking a language they may not fully understand, or knowing that many of the people they meet may eventually leave. The friendships of childhood and early adulthood often developed almost by accident: the same classroom, the same university, the same neighborhood, the same people appearing day after day. As adults, we find those natural opportunities less common. Friendship suddenly requires time, effort, vulnerability, and sometimes a fair amount of luck.
There is actually a psychological reason why childhood friendships could feel so much easier. One factor that contributes to attraction and connection is proximity. People tend to develop stronger relationships with those they regularly encounter. Repeated exposure creates familiarity, and familiarity can increase liking and comfort over time. School and university provided this almost automatically. People spent hours together, shared experiences, had countless small conversations, and gradually learned about one another without consciously deciding to build a friendship.
Adulthood removes much of that structure. People work different hours, have partners, children, responsibilities, and established routines. They may meet someone they genuinely like, only to realize they see each other once every three weeks. There is no shared classroom, lunch break or university bar keeping the relationship alive. Without regular contact, a promising connection can disappear before it has had the chance to become a friendship.
And then there is vulnerability. Close friendship requires gradually allowing another person to know more than the socially acceptable version of oneself. It means talking about insecurities, disappointments, family problems, fears, ambitions, and the things that do not fit neatly into casual conversation. Yet adults often become more cautious about doing this. They have experienced friendships ending, rejection, betrayal, exclusion, or simply the painful realization that someone they trusted was not as invested as they were. So, there can be a strange contradiction: people want deeper friendships, but they may also protect themselves from the vulnerability required to create them. This can make adult friendship feel like an awkward dance. One person shares something personal and waits to see what happens. The other person decides whether it feels safe to reciprocate. Both may be interested in becoming closer, but neither wants to appear too eager. Both may be waiting for the other to initiate the next invitation. Sometimes two people can spend months thinking, “We should really do something together,” without either of them ever suggesting a date.
Friendship becomes even more complicated abroad. For people living outside their home country, the usual difficulties of adult friendship can become much more pronounced. Language is an obvious barrier, but it is not simply about being able to have a conversation. Speaking another language can change how someone experiences themselves socially. Humor may not translate. Sarcasm can become harder to recognize. Emotional conversations require more concentration. Someone who is naturally funny, confident, and expressive in their first language may suddenly feel quieter or less interesting in their second. That can be psychologically exhausting. There is also something particularly frustrating about meeting someone with whom there seems to be an immediate connection, only to realize that communication constantly gets in the way. The friendship may be emotionally compatible but linguistically difficult.
Then there is the opposite problem. Sometimes the people with whom communication is easiest are the people with whom there is the greatest cultural distance. They may speak the same language, but have very different ideas about relationships, family, humor, boundaries, socializing or even what friendship is supposed to look like. Someone can therefore find themselves caught between two groups: people with whom communication is easy but connection feels difficult, and people with whom connection feels natural but communication takes considerable effort. Neither situation necessarily means the friendship is doomed. But both require more work than most people realize.
There is, however, another side to living abroad. People who are far from home can sometimes become close much faster than they would have under normal circumstances. Shared displacement creates an immediate point of understanding. Two people may not have much else in common, but they both know what it feels like to miss familiar food, struggle with bureaucracy, misunderstand a cultural norm, celebrate a holiday away from family, or suddenly realize that something which once felt completely ordinary has become unfamiliar. There is a psychological comfort in being understood without having to explain everything. This can create what might be called a shared outsider experience. Two people recognize something in each other that people who have always lived in the same environment may not fully understand.
It can also make conversations deeper surprisingly quickly. There is less need for the usual background information because both people already share an important piece of context: we are not from where we are from. But this can create another interesting problem: The friendship with an expiration date. People living abroad often know that their friendships may be temporary. Someone is on a two-year contract. Someone's partner is transferred. Someone is studying for a year. Someone's visa expires. Someone decides to return home. There is something psychologically interesting about knowing from the beginning that a relationship has an end date. Sometimes it makes people more willing to invest.
There may be less hesitation about opening up because the relationship feels unusually contained. Two people can become very close very quickly because there is a shared understanding that their time together is limited. They may travel together, share personal stories, and create a level of intimacy that might otherwise take years. In some cases, the temporary nature of the friendship makes it feel safer. There is less concern about the long-term consequences of being completely yourself when there is already an assumption that life will eventually separate you. But temporary friendships can also create emotional distance. Why become deeply attached to someone who is going to leave? That question does not always appear consciously, but people can protect themselves from anticipated loss by keeping relationships slightly superficial. It can seem easier not to become too dependent on someone when they are already halfway out the door.
This is one reason why friendships between people living abroad can sometimes be intense and short-lived. They can move surprisingly quickly from “We just met” to “I cannot believe I am telling this person all of this” and then, months or years later, to “We haven't spoken in six months.” The friendship may have been genuine. Its ending does not make it less so.
Another uncomfortable truth is that adult friendship often requires deliberate effort. Children do not usually say, “I think we should schedule some social time next Thursday.” They simply play together because they happen to be in the same place. Adults have to create the opportunities that childhood environments provided automatically. That might mean sending the message first. Suggesting another coffee. Inviting someone to dinner rather than waiting to be invited. Remembering something they mentioned and asking about it later. Making space for the relationship even when life is busy. This can feel strangely vulnerable. The older someone gets, the more likely they are to interpret a lack of reciprocity as rejection. If an invitation is declined twice, they may stop asking. If someone never initiates contact, they may assume the other person is not interested. Sometimes that assumption is correct. Sometimes the other person is simply busy, socially cautious, or making exactly the same assumption in reverse.
Friendship therefore requires a certain tolerance for uncertainty. Not every new connection will become a close friendship. Some people will remain acquaintances. Some will become friends for a particular period of life. Some will become lifelong friends. And that is normal. Not every friendship has to become a best friendship
There can also be too much pressure placed on adult friendships. A person may meet someone they enjoy spending time with and immediately wonder whether this could become their person. When it does not develop into an intense, lifelong friendship, they may conclude that something is missing. But friendships can serve different psychological functions. Some people provide emotional intimacy. Others provide humor, adventure, intellectual stimulation, practical support, or simply companionship. Someone might be the person to call when life falls apart, while someone else is the person who makes an ordinary Tuesday evening more enjoyable. Not every friendship needs to fulfill every need. This becomes particularly important when someone is living abroad. A person may have a friend they speak to almost every day but would never call in a crisis. Another might be someone they only see occasionally but with whom they can immediately pick up where they left off. Both relationships can be meaningful.
So why is making friends as an adult so damn hard?
Because adulthood removes many of the conditions that once made friendship easy. There is less proximity. Less free time. More responsibilities. More established identities. More caution. More prior experiences that can influence how willing someone is to trust another person. Living abroad can add language barriers, cultural differences, and the knowledge that relationships may be temporary. None of this means adults are incapable of forming deep friendships. It simply means that friendship has changed from something that often happened around them into something they increasingly have to create. And perhaps that is the part people underestimate.
Sometimes the problem is not that someone has become less interesting, less sociable, or less capable of connecting. They may simply no longer be surrounded by the conditions that made connection almost inevitable when they were younger. Making friends as an adult requires showing up repeatedly, allowing someone to gradually know the real person behind the polite conversation, accepting a little awkwardness, taking the occasional social risk and recognizing that not every connection needs to last forever to have mattered. For someone living far from home, there may be an additional lesson: sometimes belonging does not arrive as one perfect friendship group. It is built slowly, through a collection of people who each make an unfamiliar place feel a little more familiar. And sometimes, the friend who understands exactly what it feels like to be far from home is the person who makes the place feel like home for a while.