Birds of a feather – Expats and friendship

 

One of the heaviest prices to pay when adopting a new country is leaving behind old friendships. This loss creates the need to build a new network of friends, a task that can be challenging. Clearly, chemistry is an essential element in any friendship, including platonic ones, and generally hard to find. Complicating this search are a series of cultural elements that render it difficult to make bonds with one’s adopted people as I will explain.

To clarify, by friendship, I am referring to platonic friendship, not romantic or professional connections. In the former, sex helps dissolve, at least temporarily, many cultural differences. In the latter, occupational interests create a mutual need to cooperate and a natural shared experience. Platonic friendships involve liking someone without interest or need. They are, thus, highly susceptible to cultural interference.

The most obvious factor making it difficult for an expat to make friends with a local person is a lack of a shared childhood. An expat generally only meets someone after they have become an adult. You do not share the same school , neighborhood or even university. It is impossible to talk about the “time that…..” Expats start at zero.

This limitation can be severe in cultures where people stop adding to social circles early on in life, often no later than university days. In many societies, such as many parts of France, registration on the friend list stops at the age of 25 or so. For older immigrants, it can make it quite difficult to find similarly aged friends.

Another societal limitation is gender segregation. In some countries,  such as the United States and the UK, men and women can become platonic friends without raising too many eyebrows. By contrast, in more conservative regions, notably the Middle East, there is too often a sexual assumption to any connection between people of the opposite sex. This attribution takes on more serious consequences when either party is married or in a serious relationship. As a result, the pool of potential friends is even more limited.

Not only do people from different cultures lack a shared childhood but they often grew up in widely different cultures. They do not share the same childhood memories, whether it is TV or societal rituals. It is far more comfortable to not need to explain to someone. Foreign friends require more effort.

Even the rules of friendship vary from culture to culture. For example, Americans have no problem with dividing their friends into limiting categories, e.g., golf friends and travel friends. By contrast, Europeans tend to take the total obligation approach, i.e., a friend must be willing to fully commit to a friendship. The differences in conceptions often take years to understand and lead to great and frequent disappointments. They also sometimes block friendship.

With all these interference factors, expats can find it difficult to fully integrate into a new society. The connections too often feel a bit forced. Fortunately, the chemistry between people is occasionally sufficiently strong to allow the creation of a friendship between expats and natives. More common, at least in my experience, is that expats find the most common ground with other expats, not necessarily from the same country, with similar enough cultural backgrounds. Expats form their own tribe in a certain sense.

According to the expression, birds of a feather stick together. Expats partially replace shared childhoods with shared experiences of trying to integrate into an alien society. We often grasp each other better than we understand our new home-grown neighbors no matter how much we strive to integrate ourselves. Such bonding is not a tragedy but an indication of the strength of human will to adjust and adapt. Human beings, even imported ones, need a telephone line to hand out on.