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Get startedNobody tells you that making friends gets harder after about twenty-two. At school and in first-year halls, friendship happened to you: the same people, in the same room, every day, for years. Nobody had to arrange anything. Move to a new country at twenty-four and that machinery is gone. You have to build deliberately what used to assemble itself.
This is the single most common thing internationals find harder than they expected, and it is almost never discussed honestly, because admitting you have no friends yet feels like admitting something about yourself. It is not. It is arithmetic. You removed every relationship you had and replaced them with none.
The good news is that friendship follows fairly predictable rules, and most of them are about repetition rather than charm. Below are 25 things that work. Pick three and start this week, before you feel ready.
College Life, the global club for young internationals, is partnering with BetterHelp to support young people with the emotional side of starting over in a new country. BetterHelp is an online platform for psychological counseling that connects members with qualified counselors for live sessions and messaging. As part of the partnership, College Life Club members get 30% off their first three months with BetterHelp.* Become a member of College Life Club (free) to access the benefit.
Understand How Adult Friendship Actually Works
Most people fail at this by using school rules in an adult world. The mechanics genuinely changed, and knowing how changes what you do.
Repetition Beats Charm Every Time
Friendship is built by repeated unplanned exposure to the same people, which is why school and university produce so much of it. Nobody there was especially charming; they were simply present, constantly, for years. As an adult you have to manufacture that repetition deliberately. This is why one weekly commitment outperforms five brilliant one-off evenings, and why the person you will be closest to in three years is probably somebody you will meet fifteen times before you have a real conversation with them.
Expect It to Take Months, Not Weeks
Research on adult friendship consistently suggests it takes a substantial number of hours together before acquaintance becomes friendship, and considerably more before it becomes a close one. Applied to a weekly club, that is most of a year. Knowing the timescale prevents the most common mistake, which is concluding after six weeks that a group is unfriendly when in fact the process is simply running at its normal speed. Setting that expectation before you arrive removes an enormous amount of unnecessary self-criticism, because the alternative is concluding that something is wrong with you at precisely the point where nothing is.
Somebody Has to Organise, and It Will Be You
Most people are pleased to be invited and almost nobody initiates. If you wait to be included, you will wait a long time and conclude wrongly that nobody wanted you there. Being the person who suggests the date carries no status cost in most cultures and considerable benefit, and it is the single most useful habit available to a newcomer. In practice this means sending the message you are hoping somebody else will send. It stops feeling awkward after about the fourth time, and by then you will usually have noticed that the people you invited are pleased rather than surprised.
Volume Early, Depth Later
For the first two months, say yes to almost everything and accept a very low hit rate. Most invitations lead nowhere. After eight weeks, stop and look at who is actually still in your calendar, then put your energy into those three or four people rather than continuing to meet new ones indefinitely. Endless breadth is a common trap: it feels productive, it fills a calendar, and it never produces the person who would notice if you went quiet for a week.
Proximity Does the Heavy Lifting
The friendships that survive are disproportionately the ones that are geographically easy. A person twenty minutes away will become a friend; a person across the city, however well matched, usually will not. Weigh your choices towards whatever is close enough that seeing them requires no planning. This is worth factoring into where you live, which club you join and which café you adopt. Convenience sounds like a shallow basis for friendship and is in fact one of the strongest predictors of which ones survive.
Stop Auditioning
Newcomers often perform an edited, agreeable version of themselves, which is exhausting and produces pleasant acquaintances rather than friends. People connect over specificity and mild disagreement, not over amiability. Saying what you actually think about something is a faster route to a real friendship than being easy to get along with. Agreeableness is forgettable. Having a specific opinion about a film, a city or a course gives somebody something to respond to, and responding is how conversations become relationships.
Put Yourself Where the Same People Are
Nearly everything on this list is a variation on one instruction: get into a room that the same people come back to. These are the rooms that work.
Join a Club That Meets Weekly
Sports, choirs, hiking, climbing, board games, language exchanges. In Germany the Verein is the central institution for this and in most of Europe there is an equivalent. The mechanism is the fixed schedule and the returning faces, not the activity, so choose something you will turn up to in the rain rather than something impressive. Commit to three months before judging whether it is working. Sign up at the start of a semester where you can, since intakes cluster and joining in week two is considerably easier than joining in week nine when the group has already settled.
Take a Shared Flat Over a Studio
A WG or flatshare supplies incidental contact, which no amount of organised socialising replicates. Kitchens are where unplanned conversations happen, and unplanned is exactly what adult life stops providing. The trade is less privacy and a harder search, and for a first year in a country where you know nobody it is almost always worth making. The flatmates themselves may not become close friends, and that is not the point; their friends, their birthdays and their casual invitations are the network you are actually buying into.
Join the Student Association, Not Just the Course
Course friends see you in a context where everyone is stressed and half-present. A study association, faculty society or student union does the same job that halls used to do, with events on a schedule and a group that persists across the year. This is the closest available substitute for the environment that made friendship easy at eighteen. Most universities have dozens and most students join none, assuming their course will supply a social life. It generally will not, because a course is a timetable rather than a community.
Volunteer for Something Regular
Volunteering puts you beside people who are doing something together rather than talking about themselves, which is a far easier setting for a newcomer with imperfect language. It also has unusually low social stakes: nobody is assessing whether you are interesting, because everyone is occupied. Food banks, animal shelters, festivals, language cafés and student-run projects all work. The shared task removes the pressure to perform, which is exactly what makes it easier than a party. Weekly beats occasional here too.
Use the Gym as a Fixed Point, Not a Social Plan
Gyms rarely produce friendships directly, and a class does. Anything with a fixed time, an instructor and the same twelve people works: bouldering, martial arts, a running club, a dance class. Our guide to balancing study and life covers fitting one into a week that already feels full. Bouldering gyms in particular tend to be unusually social, because the sport involves standing around between attempts and strangers routinely give each other advice, which removes the hardest part of starting a conversation.
Get a Job With Colleagues
Part-time work in a bar, a shop or a café is one of the fastest social routes available, and it solves money at the same time. You are placed among the same people repeatedly, given something to talk about, and pushed into using the local language in a low-stakes setting where being imperfect is entirely normal. Hospitality work in particular throws you together with people your own age on shifts nobody else wants, which is an unglamorous but genuinely effective route into a city. The friendships that come out of it also tend to sit outside the university bubble, which makes them more durable across the summer.
Find Your Third Place
Not home, not work or campus. A café, a library, a particular bench, a bakery. Somewhere you go often enough that the staff nod at you. The nod is worth more than it sounds; it is the smallest unit of being known. Choose somewhere within walking distance, because the entire value depends on going often. A mediocre café twice a week beats an excellent one twice a year. Go at the same time on the same days if you can, because that is how you end up seeing the same other regulars rather than a fresh set of strangers each visit.
Do the Things People Avoid
Most of what actually works feels slightly uncomfortable, which is exactly why most people do not do it and then conclude the city is unfriendly.
Ask for the Second Meeting
The moment that decides most friendships is the one where a pleasant first conversation either turns into a specific plan or evaporates. Say something concrete before you part: a day, an activity, a place. Specific beats open every time, because an open invitation puts the work of proposing back on the other person and most people will not do it. Vague enthusiasm about meeting up sometime almost never converts, and the difference between a friend and an acquaintance is frequently just this one habit. It feels forward and it is not. Most people are quietly relieved that somebody else did the organising, because they wanted the same thing and assumed proposing it would be an imposition.
Invite People to Ordinary Things
You do not need a dinner party. Ask someone to come to the supermarket, the flea market, a walk, a film. Low-stakes invitations are easier to accept and easier to repeat, and repetition is the mechanism. Elaborate hosting raises the bar for everyone and usually happens once. The best invitation is one you could plausibly repeat next week without it becoming an occasion, because occasions are memorable and habits are what actually build closeness. Errands work surprisingly well, because they carry no expectation that anyone will be entertaining.
Follow Up Within a Week
Momentum matters more than polish. A short message a few days after meeting someone, referencing something specific you talked about, does more than a carefully composed one three weeks later. Most connections die from silence rather than rejection. Send it badly rather than not at all; nobody has ever examined a friendly message for craftsmanship. If you find yourself drafting and redrafting, that is a sign to press send rather than a sign to keep working on it. A single line is enough.
Be the One Who Remembers
Note when somebody mentions an exam, an interview, a visiting parent, and ask about it afterwards. This costs almost nothing and is startlingly rare. Being remembered is one of the strongest signals of care available, and it converts acquaintances into friends faster than shared interests do. Write things down if you need to. There is nothing cynical about keeping track of what matters to people; it is simply the thing that used to happen automatically when you saw them every day and now does not.
Say the Slightly Vulnerable Thing
Admitting you find it hard to meet people, that you are homesick, that the winter is getting to you, gives the other person permission to be honest too. Almost everyone in an international setting is having some version of the same week, and someone has to go first. It is usually a relief rather than a burden. The version of this that fails is unloading everything at once on a near-stranger. The version that works is one honest sentence in an otherwise ordinary conversation, offered lightly enough that the other person can pick it up or not.
Tolerate the Awkward Middle
There is a stage, somewhere between weeks four and twelve, where you know people well enough to greet them and not well enough to relax. Most people quietly withdraw here because it feels like failure. It is not failure; it is the middle, and the only way past it is to keep showing up through it. Naming it helps: if you know the awkward middle is a documented stage rather than evidence that these particular people dislike you, it becomes much easier to attend the fourth session when the third one felt flat.
Do Not Read Reserve as Rejection
In much of northern Europe, small talk with strangers is rare and social circles are settled. That reads as unfriendliness to anyone from a warmer culture and is very rarely meant that way. Slow to start and durable once formed is the pattern, and judging it by month-one signals produces entirely the wrong conclusion. Internationals who leave after a year frequently say the locals were cold; those who stay three years usually say the opposite, and the difference between those two accounts is almost entirely time rather than temperament.
Do Not Wait Until It Is Bad
Building a social life from nothing is genuinely hard, and an outside perspective helps before it becomes urgent rather than after. BetterHelp matches you with a qualified psychological counselor after a short questionnaire, and you can change counselor at any point if the fit is wrong, which removes most of the risk of trying it early. It also gives you one conversation a week that is not an audition.
Build Something That Lasts Past This Year
The mistake most internationals make is building a social life entirely out of people who are also leaving.
Make One Local Friend Deliberately
International friendships form fast because everyone understands the situation, and they end when contracts and exchanges finish. One friend who is actually from here is an anchor that does not leave, plus a door into how the country works. This rarely happens by accident; it usually requires choosing an activity that is not aimed at internationals. Erasmus events, international student nights and expat groups are all easy and all self-selecting. The local sports club, the neighbourhood choir and the volunteering slot are harder and are where the people who are staying actually are.
Learn Enough of the Language to Stay in the Room
You may not need it to function. You need it to stop being the reason a table switches to English. Twenty minutes on three fixed mornings beats an intensive course abandoned in November. Our guide to learning a local language covers why the first hundred words matter so much. The goal in year one is following the gist of a group conversation, not fluency. That is the threshold where you stop being a guest at the table and start being a participant who is occasionally lost.
Keep the Friendships That Predate the Move
The people who knew you before you arrived can tell whether you sound like yourself, which is genuinely hard to judge from the inside. Keep one or two of those relationships properly rather than letting everything drift into a muted group chat. There is a difference between muting a group that shows you plans you cannot join and quietly losing contact with the two people who actually know you. Schedule a call rather than relying on impulse. A fixed weekly or fortnightly slot survives a busy month; good intentions do not. It also gives them a shape to hold on to, which reduces the anxious check-ins that make you feel monitored rather than loved.
Accept That Some Will Leave
International communities churn every June, and losing three friends in a summer is normal rather than a failure of the friendships. It still hurts, and it is worth naming in advance so that when it happens you read it as the structure of international life rather than as evidence that you are bad at keeping people. Planning for it, by keeping a mix of locals and internationals and by continuing to meet new people in year two, is the difference between a social life that compounds and one that resets annually. The second and third years abroad are usually far easier than the first, but only for people who kept adding rather than assuming the group they had was permanent.
Protect Your Sleep and Your Week
Everything social is harder on a sleep debt, and a dark European winter will wreck an unprotected sleep pattern by December. Our guide to sleeping abroad covers the mechanics; the social point is simply that the version of you that turns up rested is much easier to befriend. Turning down an invitation because you are exhausted is reasonable once and corrosive as a pattern, and the pattern usually starts with sleep rather than with any decision you consciously made. Rested is a social skill.
Do Not Judge It in February
The first winter is the hardest and the light does not really return until March. Anyone assessing their social life at that point is assessing it at the bottom of the curve. Write down in September what you hoped for, read it back in spring, and make any big decision in daylight rather than on a dark Tuesday. Most people who leave in their first winter say afterwards that they left at the bottom of the curve rather than at a conclusion, which is a specific and avoidable mistake.
Talk to Someone If It Is Not Shifting
Loneliness while building a new life is normal and it still wears people down. If the flat feeling is constant rather than tied to particular evenings, a qualified psychological counselor sits outside your situation in a way new acquaintances cannot. BetterHelp connects you with a counselor you can message whenever something comes up, plus a live session by video, phone or chat, usually once a week. You can change counselor at any point if the fit is not right, and everything happens online, which suits a life where your address and timetable are both still moving. College Life members get 30% off their first three months.
The Short Version
Making friends as an adult in a new country is not a personality test. It is a numbers-and-repetition problem, and the people who solve it fastest are rarely the most charming ones. They are the ones who joined something weekly in month one, kept turning up through the awkward middle, and asked for the second meeting instead of waiting to be asked.
Pick three of these and start this week. Say yes for eight weeks, then invest in whoever is left. Make one friend who is not leaving in June. And give the whole thing a year, because almost nobody can name the week it stopped feeling like effort.
College Life is working with BetterHelp so that talking it through is an ordinary option rather than a last resort. Members get 30% off their first three months. *Offer for first time members only. Join College Life Club for free and claim it here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is it so much harder to make friends after university?
Because the machinery disappears. School and university supply repeated unplanned contact with the same people over years, which is the main ingredient in friendship, and nobody has to arrange any of it. As an adult you have to manufacture that repetition deliberately through clubs, shared housing or work. The difficulty is structural rather than personal, which is why it affects almost everyone who moves.
How long should I give a new club or activity before deciding it is not working?
At least three months of consistent attendance. The point at which people begin including you outside the activity itself is typically somewhere around week ten, and most people quit before that. Going twice, concluding the group is closed, and trying something else is the most common way to spend a year meeting nobody. Attendance is the mechanism; the activity matters far less.
Should I focus on other internationals or on locals?
Both, deliberately. International friendships form quickly because everyone shares the situation, and they churn as exchanges and contracts end. Local friendships form slowly and tend to stay. A social life built entirely from internationals resets every June, so it is worth choosing at least one activity that is not aimed at newcomers.
What if I am too shy to invite people to things?
Start with low-stakes invitations rather than social occasions: a walk, the supermarket, a film, studying together in a library. These are much easier to offer and to accept than dinner, and they are repeatable, which is what actually matters. Almost nobody minds being invited, and the discomfort you feel asking is considerably larger than anything the other person experiences.
When is loneliness worth talking to a counselor about?
The useful test is whether the feeling moves. Ordinary loneliness while building a new life is situational and lifts when you are with people or absorbed in something. If low feelings are constant rather than situational, persist for weeks without shifting, or are affecting your sleep, your eating and your ability to get through the day, that is worth talking through with a qualified professional rather than waiting out alone.