Lonely After the Move: How to Make Friends as an Adult Woman in a New Country

Feel­ing lonely after moving to an­oth­er coun­try is common, and it isn’t a sign that some­thing is wrong with you. Adult friend­ships simply take time: re­search sug­gests it can take dozens of hours to make a casual friend and more than 200 to make a close one. The most re­li­able way through is to keep show­ing up, again and again, around the same people.

Why it hits so hard

Back home, your circle built itself over years with­out much effort. Class­mates, co­work­ers, neigh­bors, the moms from your kid’s day­care, the friend you could call at 11 p.m. with­out ex­plain­ing why you were crying. A move wipes out that whole net­work overnight. What’s left are video calls, a time dif­fer­ence, and the uneasy sense that your friends’ lives are moving on with­out you.

Here, you’re start­ing from scratch, and doing it when your energy is al­ready stretched thin by pa­per­work, a new job, kids ad­just­ing to school, and a lan­guage that still takes effort. Amer­i­cans are often friend­ly and easy to talk to, but “We should grab coffee some­time!” doesn’t always turn into an actual coffee. That’s not fake or cold. It’s just a dif­fer­ent rhythm of get­ting close. If you’re in the rough middle stretch of ad­just­ing, our piece on cul­ture shock walks through the stages in more detail.

Lone­li­ness also doesn’t always look the way people expect. You can live with a hus­band and kids and still feel alone, be­cause no one here knew you before. You can spend all day in a busy office and never have one real con­ver­sa­tion. Lone­li­ness isn’t about how many people are around you. It’s about miss­ing the kind of con­nec­tion where some­one ac­tu­al­ly sees you.

What loneliness isn’t

It helps to sep­a­rate the feel­ing from the sto­ries we attach to it. Lone­li­ness after a move isn’t proof that you’re bad at friend­ship or not in­ter­est­ing enough. It doesn’t mean the move was a mis­take. And it doesn’t have to last.

Think of it as some­thing closer to hunger: a signal that you’re miss­ing some­thing you need. There’s noth­ing shame­ful about being hungry, and you don’t have to fight it. You just have to start feed­ing it, even in small bites.

And if you catch your­self think­ing, “I chose this, so I don’t get to com­plain,” you can set that down, too. You can love your new life and still miss your old one.

What the research says

Friend­ship runs on hours, and some­one ac­tu­al­ly count­ed them. Jef­frey Hall, a com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kansas, pub­lished a study in 2018 asking how much time it takes to become friends. In one part, he sur­veyed 355 adults who had moved within the pre­vi­ous six months and were look­ing for new friends. In an­oth­er, he fol­lowed 112 col­lege fresh­men who had just ar­rived on campus. His es­ti­mates: rough­ly 50 hours to­geth­er to go from ac­quain­tance to casual friend, about 90 hours to become a real friend, and more than 200 hours to become close friends. These are rough av­er­ages from an ob­ser­va­tion­al study, not a rule or a promised time­line; every friend­ship moves at its own pace. Not all hours are equal, either. Time spent just work­ing side by side count­ed for less; hang­ing out, joking around, and catch­ing up count­ed for more. [1]

Put that into real life and the math is hum­bling, but also re­as­sur­ing. A two-hour coffee once a week adds up to about 100 hours a year. One stand­ing weekly date can turn an ac­quain­tance into a friend in a year, but not in a month. If you’ve been here six months and still don’t have a friend you’d call in a crisis, the prob­lem may not be you. You may just not have logged the hours yet.

You are far from the only one. In 2023, US Sur­geon Gen­er­al Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an ad­vi­so­ry called “Our Epi­dem­ic of Lone­li­ness and Iso­la­tion.” It re­ports that about half of US adults say they’ve ex­pe­ri­enced lone­li­ness, and it links a lack of social con­nec­tion to higher risks of heart dis­ease, stroke, de­pres­sion, and pre­ma­ture death, com­par­ing the effect on mor­tal­i­ty to smok­ing up to 15 cig­a­rettes a day. [2]

Those num­bers aren’t meant to scare you. They say two things. First, you’re in very large com­pa­ny: plenty of people who never moved any­where feel lonely too. Second, in­vest­ing in con­nec­tion isn’t a luxury. It be­longs on the same list as sleep and move­ment.

How to make friends after moving: practical steps

1. Choose rep­e­ti­tion over one-off events. A single net­work­ing night rarely turns into a friend­ship. Look for places where the same people gather on a reg­u­lar sched­ule, same day, same time. Rep­e­ti­tion takes the awk­ward­ness out: by the third week, you don’t have to work so hard to start a con­ver­sa­tion.

2. Go small. It’s much easier to talk in a group of eight than in a room of two hun­dred. Try a book club, a craft or lan­guage circle at your public li­brary, a pot­tery or fit­ness class at a com­mu­ni­ty col­lege, a run­ning group, a choir, a vol­un­teer shift. Meetup, your neigh­bor­hood Face­book group, and local par­ents’ groups are good places to look. If you’re part of a faith com­mu­ni­ty, small groups there can be an­oth­er nat­u­ral door­way.

3. Make the first move, and the second one. Most adults are qui­et­ly wait­ing to be in­vit­ed. Sug­gest coffee after class, a play­ground meetup, a trip to the farm­ers market. If she says yes, follow up a week or two later. Hall sug­gests chang­ing the set­ting: if you know some­one from work, ask her to lunch out­side the office. It sig­nals you’re in­ter­est­ed in her, not just the job. [1]

4. Let lan­guage be an excuse, not a wall. ESL class­es and con­ver­sa­tion groups are great places to meet people pre­cise­ly be­cause ev­ery­one is in the same boat and a little ner­vous. An accent mat­ters much less in a friend­ship than you might fear. People usu­al­ly care more about your at­ten­tion than your gram­mar.

5. Find your com­mu­ni­ty from home, and don’t stop there. Other women from home offer some­thing locals can’t: shared songs, inside jokes, no need to ex­plain your­self, tips on doc­tors and pa­per­work. That’s real sup­port, es­pe­cial­ly in year one. But if your whole circle speaks only your first lan­guage, your new coun­try can stay for­eign. A good bal­ance is one or two places where you speak your first lan­guage and at least one where you speak Eng­lish.

6. Help out with­out turn­ing it into a test. Vol­un­teer­ing, pitch­ing in at your kid’s school, bring­ing soup to a neigh­bor who just had surgery: these are nat­u­ral ways to become part of a place. Just make sure it’s some­thing you enjoy, not a way to earn your seat at the table.

7. Keep old friend­ships alive, minus the guilt. Friends back home are still your friends. Set a reg­u­lar call, even once every two weeks. But don’t expect them to re­place in-person com­pa­ny, and don’t blame them if they can’t fully pic­ture your new life.

8. Count the small wins. A neigh­bor waves. The barista re­mem­bers your order. Some­one in your group asks how your week went. That’s the be­gin­ning of a net­work, even if it still feels thin.

One try a week. If all of this feels like too much, start with one thing: pick a place you’ll go to reg­u­lar­ly, show up a second and third time, and sug­gest coffee to some­one. If they say no or don’t follow up, it isn’t a per­son­al fail­ure—adults have plenty of rea­sons of their own. Next week, try again.

For more on where to put your energy in the first months, see Your First Year in Amer­i­ca.

When loneliness turns into something heavier

Lone­li­ness on its own isn’t an ill­ness. But some­times it slides into some­thing harder to carry alone. Pay at­ten­tion if, for more than a couple of weeks, you notice:

• a low or empty mood most of the time;
• losing in­ter­est in things you used to enjoy;
• changes in sleep: trou­ble fall­ing asleep, waking very early, or sleep­ing much more than usual;
• a no­tice­able change in ap­petite;
• strug­gling to get to work or take care of your­self and your family;
• feel­ing hope­less, or think­ing ev­ery­one would be better off with­out you.

That’s not a reason to be hard on your­self or to keep push­ing through. It’s a reason to talk to some­one: a ther­a­pist, a coun­selor, or your doctor. Many ther­a­pists in the US work in lan­guages other than Eng­lish, often online. If you ever feel like you’re in crisis, you can call or text 988, the Sui­cide & Crisis Life­line, any time of day.

One last thing

Adult friend­ship almost never just hap­pens. It’s built out of things that look or­di­nary from the out­side: the same Tues­day group, the same Sat­ur­day park, one more “How are you doing?” text. It’s slow, and that’s normal.

If you don’t have a single friend here yet, that’s not where your story ends. It’s where it starts. Pick one place you’ll go back to every week. A few months from now, there’s a good chance some­one there will be glad to see you walk in.

Read next:

• Cul­ture Shock: Why Life After a Move Can Feel So Hard—and How to Get Through It
• Your First Year in Amer­i­ca: What Really Mat­ters for Women After the Move

Sources

[1] Hall, J. A. (2019). How many hours does it take to make a friend? Jour­nal of Social and Per­son­al Re­la­tion­ships, 36(4) (pub­lished online 2018). https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407518761225 · Uni­ver­si­ty of Kansas news re­lease

[2] Office of the U.S. Sur­geon Gen­er­al. (2023). Our Epi­dem­ic of Lone­li­ness and Iso­la­tion: The U.S. Sur­geon Gen­er­al’s Ad­vi­so­ry on the Heal­ing Ef­fects of Social Con­nec­tion and Com­mu­ni­ty. Full text (PDF)

This ar­ti­cle is for in­for­ma­tion­al pur­pos­es only and is not a sub­sti­tute for advice from a li­censed mental health pro­fes­sion­al or doctor.

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