Why do I still feel like an outsider where I live?

Am I imagining it, or are people here hard to get close to?

Something real is going on, and it has more to do with how contact begins in your new country than with how you come across. In many places a certain amount of social life simply happens to you. A shop assistant jokes with you, a colleague wants to hear about your Saturday, someone holds your glance a moment longer than needed. In some countries that layer is very thin. Its absence is not neutral, and your body notices: the slightly empty walk home, the sense of having gone through a whole day without touching anyone.

Those tiny exchanges seem to matter more than their size suggests. In two studies of commuters, people who had brief friendly exchanges with their shuttle driver reported feeling better, and in the second study people were asked to greet or thank the driver rather than simply reporting what they usually did¹. The first study was correlational and both looked only at commuters, so I read it as suggestive, not settled. What it supports is small and useful: the little contacts count, and you are not being oversensitive for missing them.

So you are not imagining it when you keep feeling like an outsider. Where things can go wrong is the next step, when that thin layer gets read as rejection.

Why does friendliness never turn into friendship?

In many cultures being friendly and becoming friends follow separate tracks, and the first rarely becomes the second on its own. Colleagues are pleasant. The neighbour chats by the bins. The parents at school are friendly enough. Nothing deepens, and after a year you begin to wonder what you are doing wrong. Often the answer is not a missing skill but a quantity of time you have not yet reached.

One researcher who studied adults who had recently moved, and first-year students, estimated that going from acquaintance to casual friend took somewhere around 40 to 60 hours together, and that close friendship took 200 hours or more². He is clear that the numbers are rough, partly reconstructed from memory, and based on American samples. I treat them as a sense of scale rather than a goal. The useful part is the shape: friendship grows out of ordinary time piling up, and adult life abroad offers few places where that happens by accident. School did it. The club you joined as a teenager did it. An office where everyone leaves promptly at four does not.

Here is the bind. You want the warmth you are receiving to mean something, and it is real, only smaller than you wish. Writing it off as fake would throw away the little you have built.

What do I actually want when I long to belong?

Wanting local friends usually hides a sharper wish: to matter to someone who chose you freely, not out of duty. It helps to pull the threads apart, because each has a different answer.

• Company. Someone to spend a Tuesday evening with.
• Being missed. Someone who would notice if you vanished for two weeks.
• Belonging to a circle. A group whose plans already have you in them, without you arranging it.

People often tell me they have no friends at all, and when we slow down there are four or five people they see regularly and nobody in front of whom they can be unimpressive. In my view the in-between ties, the gym regular, the classmate, the colleague you genuinely like, are worth valuing in their own right, even though most of them will never become close. Counting them changes how your week feels. Still, they are no substitute for someone who has seen you at your least polished.

What does a long winter of this do to me?

The harm is seldom the loneliness itself, but the conclusion about yourself that you draw while you are lonely. First comes tiredness, then pulling back, then the explanation. You stop suggesting plans because the last few led nowhere. You turn down the one invitation you do receive because staying bright all evening in a language that is not your own feels beyond you. By late winter the story has often shifted from this place is hard to get into to a quieter, more personal verdict on who you are.

Notice when you begin turning yourself down before anyone else can. It tends to appear as a thought on the threshold of a gathering: nobody in there wants to talk to me, so I will leave early. It protects you, and it costs a great deal, since it takes away any chance of being proved wrong. Pushing yourself out more is not always right, and turning it into a chore tends to spoil the evenings. What matters is that a hard season does not harden into a belief about yourself.

What can I change without becoming someone else?

Pick settings that give you repetition, and stop performing where repetition is impossible. A room of strangers with drinks is about the hardest place to make a friend. The same handful of people every Wednesday for a year is about the easiest.

• Choose repetition over variety. One activity you return to each week will do more than many one-off events. The aim is to become a familiar face, so that approaching you stops costing anyone effort.
• Keep invitations small and concrete. A coffee after Thursday’s class is easy to accept. Dinner at your place is a commitment many people will postpone rather than decline, and you may read the postponement as rejection.
• Expect to do the asking. Probably for a while. That tends to reflect who has free time and who does not, more than any imbalance of interest.
• Say the awkward thing simply. Hints rarely land. “I moved here recently and am hoping to know a few more people. Coffee sometime?” sounds unusual, and in my experience it is welcomed far more often than not.
• Hold on to one easy connection. A friend from before, who speaks your first language and needs no introduction to you. In a low month, that person reminds you that you were always worth knowing.

These ideas only go so far. When the low feeling has gone on for months, has crept into how you sleep and work, and your inner voice has grown cruel, extra invitations will not fix it, and stumbling over them would only seem to prove the harsh story. The same is true if being kept outside has stirred something much older, from long before you moved. At that point it deserves careful attention with a therapist.

Questions people ask

Is loneliness after a move a good enough reason for therapy?

Yes, especially once it has started to change how you see yourself. Many people wait until that shift is well advanced, when an earlier start would have been easier.

Will you simply tell me to go out and join things?

No, you already know that advice. We look instead at what goes on in you in the second before you reach out, since that is where people tend to hold back.

Can I have sessions by video from where I live?

Yes, all sessions are online by video, in English. We find a regular time in Copenhagen time that fits your week.

My partner is local. Should they join?

Start on your own first. When one partner belongs and the other does not, loneliness can quickly become an argument about blame, and your own part is easier to untangle alone.

How can I tell if the problem is the place or me?

Generally it is a mix, and finding the balance is part of what we do. Having made friends easily in other places tells us something, though it does not mean none of this belongs to you.

If being kept at arm’s length abroad has started to hurt, online psychotherapy gives you a place to talk it through with me in English.

Sources

1. Gunaydin, Oztekin, Karabulut and Salman-Engin. Minimal social interactions with strangers predict greater subjective well-being. Two studies of commuters, one correlational and one experimental. Journal of Happiness Studies, 2021.
2. Hall. How many hours does it take to make a friend? Two samples: adults who had recently moved, and first-year university students. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2019.

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.