How to build a social life as an expat (the honest guide)

When you move to a new country, you lose the social infrastructure that your friendship network was built on without necessarily realising it until it is gone. The primary school friendships, the university network, the neighbourhood connections, the long-term colleagues — all of these represent years of proximity-based relationship-building that cannot be quickly reconstructed.

Research on adult friendship formation consistently identifies proximity and repetition as the two primary drivers of connection. Moving abroad severs both: you are no longer proximate to your existing network, and you have not yet established the repeated contact patterns in your new location that generate new relationships.

The result is a common expat experience: being surrounded by people — at work, in your building, in cafés — while feeling fundamentally socially alone. This is not a personal failing or a cultural mismatch. It is a structural deficit with a structural solution.

Phase one is surface connection. In the first weeks and months, you accumulate people you could call acquaintances — colleagues you have coffee with, neighbours who say hello, people from a group activity you tried once. This phase feels productive but is more fragile than it appears. These connections will not develop into friendships automatically — they require deliberate investment.

Phase two is activity bonds. Somewhere between three and twelve months in, certain recurring contexts start to create stronger connections. The running group you have attended six times. The language exchange partner you meet fortnightly. The colleague who has become someone you would contact outside work. These are your embryonic friendships, and they require nurturing.

Phase three is integration — having a stable social network in your adopted city that functions as a genuine community. Most expats who get here say it took between one and three years, but that the speed was entirely dependent on how deliberately they pursued recurring, activity-based social contexts in phase two.

Relying exclusively on other expats is the most common expat social mistake. Expat-only circles have a fatal flaw: the people leave. The international expat social scene in most cities has high turnover, which means you are continuously losing connections just as they deepen. Integrating with local communities — even partially, through sport, hobby groups, or language exchange — creates more stable and longer-lasting friendships.

Waiting until you feel settled to build a social life is the second common mistake. The impulse is understandable — everything is overwhelming at first — but it leads to a vicious circle. Isolation increases the difficulty of social re-entry, which extends the isolation. Start building social structure in week one, even if it is just one thing, even if you are not ready.

Confusing activity for connection is the third. Having a full social calendar of one-off events, networking drinks, and expat meetups creates a simulation of social life without its substance. The depth of connection that combats loneliness comes from repetition with the same people. One recurring group activity per week is worth more than five different events.

The most effective social format for expats — confirmed by both research and the consistent experience of people who successfully build new social networks abroad — is a small recurring group built around a shared activity. Running, cycling, yoga, hiking, padel, language exchange, board games, cooking — the specific activity matters far less than the repetition and the group size.

The mechanism is well-understood: shared activity removes the performance pressure of pure socialising, repetition allows the brain's trust-building systems to operate across multiple encounters, and small group size (4-12 people) creates the intimacy necessary for genuine connection rather than event-scale acquaintance.

Show up to the same thing for four consecutive weeks and you will know several people's names. Do it for three months and some of those people will become part of your social fabric. This is not inspirational rhetoric — it is the consistently reported experience of expats who built successful social lives in new countries.

Social is specifically designed for the expat use case: discovering and joining recurring activity-based local plans with a reliability system that ensures the plans actually happen. Browse plans near you in your city, filter by activity type, and RSVP with one tap. The Pods feature creates recurring weekly groups of 6-10 people — the most effective format for building durable expat friendships.

Meetup.com has broad coverage but a chronic no-show problem. It works best in cities with very large user bases. Facebook Groups (search your city + activity + "expat" or "group") often surface the most active and reliable community groups, particularly for sport and hobby activities.

Language exchange apps (Tandem, HelloTalk) can create genuinely useful social connections that bridge the expat/local divide — often the most productive social investment an expat can make. The relationship is structurally balanced, culturally educational, and tends to produce more authentic connections than purely expat-facing formats.

Instagram is increasingly the channel for community fitness and activity groups in major cities. Search your city plus "running club", "hiking group", or "yoga community" to find groups that post session details as stories and stories.

One of the defining features of expat social life is its transience. People move on. Good friends leave for home, for the next city, for a new opportunity. This is one of the most emotionally wearing aspects of expat community and one that is rarely discussed honestly.

The best approach is to treat this as a feature rather than a bug: each friend who leaves is a connection to a new city, a reason to visit somewhere new, a thread in a global network. Maintain these connections genuinely — not with mass "thinking of you" messages, but with specific references to shared experiences, genuine interest in their new life, and visits when the geography makes them possible.

The other half of the answer is to keep building locally. The transience of expat community is an argument for continuously investing in new connections, not for giving up on them. The running group that loses two members every few months is still worth attending — because new members arrive, and the structure of the group maintains continuity even as the faces change.