“As humans, loneliness hurts because we evolved as social beings. We’re wired for belonging. And for many of us, that sense of belonging is built through our relationships with others. Migration can disrupt those relationships, and in doing so, change what we need friendship to do for us.”

For many of us, family serves as the first foundation for belonging. It gives you a space where you naturally belong, by default. You are born into a family, you are loved and cared for, and you experience belonging almost inherently. You also get the opportunity to practice friendship first within this environment, with your brother, your sister, your cousins. And then other friendships form, from a place where that sense of belonging is already there, in their own time, at their own pace, in school, through sport, hobbies, and so on. They add to what already exists

However, when you arrive in a new country as an adult, the story changes somewhat. Being away from home, friendship can take on a different significance. The family and lifelong friends who once provided a sense of belonging are often no longer with you. You long for connection, familiarity, safety; people who can make a new place feel a little less foreign, as loneliness and the desire for belonging begin to surface. In this context, friendship is no longer just something nice to have; it often becomes a vital way to rebuild that sense of home.

People often tell me that it is difficult to make friends as an adult, especially as a migrant. However, forming friendships in itself isn’t necessarily the hardest part. You can meet people, have conversations, go for coffee, share interests, and laugh together. What is more challenging is finding those friendships that become strong enough to give you that sense of belonging you may not even realize you’re looking for. The ones where you feel safe enough to be yourself, where you don’t constantly wonder where you stand, and where closeness is mutual and understood. But not every friendship can bear that kind of weight.

“Migration doesn’t only make us lonely. It destabilizes the language through which we recognize love, care, and friendship.”

Migration does not just confront us with our need for belonging away from home. It also confronts us with the meaning of friendship itself. And the sometimes painful realisation that Friendship is not an objective thing; it is also a cultural language.

We often assume we all know what friendship looks like, but in fact, we all grow up with invisible codes for what it looks like. We absorb them by watching the people around us and experiencing friendship within our families and communities. Nobody teaches us these rules explicitly. We come to understand, almost instinctively, what it means when someone calls, visits, invites you over, checks in, or simply shows up, and we don’t question these codes until they stop working.

In a multicultural space, everyone arrives with their own codes for intimacy. For some people, friendship means seeing each other every week. For others, it means calling when something terrible happens. For some, it means inviting you into their home. For others, it means travelling together. For others still, it means never needing to explain yourself. None of these codes is universal.

You arrive with one cultural “language” for intimacy and suddenly find yourself surrounded by people using different ones. You keep applying the old rules, and they no longer predict reality. Someone invites you into their home. Does that mean you’re close? Maybe not. Someone never texts first. Does that mean they don’t care? Maybe not. Someone sees you once a month. Are they distant? Maybe that’s what intimacy looks like where they come from. “We haven’t spoken in three months. I guess we aren’t friends anymore.” Maybe for them, three months means nothing. Maybe that kind of depth is reserved only for family.

When the instruments you used to measure closeness no longer work, it is normal to start questioning your ability to read the relationship. Is this friendship? Is this closeness? Do they care about me? Maybe I expected too much. Maybe I’m too intense. Maybe I scare people. Maybe friendship doesn’t exist. And then we start developing strategies to avoid being hurt again or to protect our ego. Some lower expectations. Others stop initiating.  Others become hyper-independent. Others chase friendships harder; others simply embrace loneliness, as a way of surviving the uncertainty of not knowing where we belong.

“We are looking for friendship because we need belonging.
But we struggle to find it because we don’t always know how to read closeness anymore.”

Immigration makes us, in a way, suddenly illiterate. Maybe that’s why building friendships as an adult and especially as an immigrant can feel so confusing. Because we’re trying to rewrite a language we didn’t even know we had. But the discomfort is not a sign something is wrong with you; it may be the tuition for building a new language, learning, again, how to recognize closeness

“But if friendship is a language we learn culturally, does that mean there is nothing universal about it? Is there something underneath all these different ways of showing closeness that we can still recognize, even when we don’t speak the same language?”

Care

The ways we express friendship can change enormously across cultures, personalities, and histories. We may have very different ideas about what friendship looks like, but underneath those differences, I think something matters across all of them: care. Care may be the underlying condition of friendship, even when it looks very different from one person to another. At its simplest, it is the feeling that another person’s well-being matters to you. Someone can disappear for six months and still care deeply about you. Someone can see you every day and not care about you at all.

People show care in different ways. Some show up physically. Some text often. Some help practically. Some remember birthdays. Some give advice. Some make you laugh. Some respect your independence; some challenge you intellectually. I might feel loved when someone checks in every week. You might express care by giving me space. Neither is necessarily wrong. The difficulty comes when I interpret your way of caring through my own.

So how do we recognize care when it doesn’t look like the care we expected?

Maybe this is why the different conditions we often associate with friendship all lead back to care. Safety is built through repeated experiences of care. When someone consistently shows us they are there, respect our boundaries, and handle what we share with them carefully, we begin to feel safe. And safety makes trust possible. Trust doesn’t appear all at once. It grows through small experiences: someone keeps their word, respects something we told them in confidence, shows up when they said they would, or responds to our vulnerability with care.

Vulnerability grows from there. It requires some evidence that the other person will hold what you’re giving them with care. If someone opens slowly, if they don’t tell you everything immediately, if they need months before trusting you, patience is not simply waiting. It is a way of saying: “You don’t have to arrive at my pace.”

People arrive carrying different histories, different betrayals, different cultures, and different definitions of friendship. Patience is a form of care because it gives those histories room to breathe. It allows two people to slowly learn about each other without demanding that closeness happen on a predetermined timeline. But when friendship has become so important to rebuilding a sense of belonging, patience can be complicated. We may need time to build trust, but we don’t necessarily have the emotional luxury of waiting indefinitely to feel at home. We can be patient while still being intentional. We can create opportunities to see someone again, initiate, ask questions, make space for the relationship, and pay attention to whether something is growing.

That is where communication becomes another form of care. Sometimes we may need to ask someone: Where are you in your friendship journey? Do you have space for a deeper friendship? What makes you feel cared for? What does closeness look like for you? We don’t always have to guess. We can tell someone that we would like to see them more often. We can ask for reassurance. We can explain what makes us feel connected. We can learn how the other person gives and receives care. Communication can save a great deal of time and turmoil because it allows two people to understand what is actually happening between them instead of each interpreting the other through their own assumptions.

And then there is mutuality. Care has to move in both directions. A friendship can survive differences in how people express care. Still, it becomes difficult when one person always initiates, adapts, understands, and makes space while the other stays distant. Mutuality doesn’t mean that everything has to be perfectly equal all the time. People go through different periods in their lives. Sometimes one person has more to give than the other. But over time, there needs to be some sense that the care is being returned.

Freedom is part of this too. Caring for someone doesn’t mean possessing them or expecting them to meet all of our needs. A friendship can be deeply important without becoming an obligation. We can care about someone and still allow them to have other friendships, other priorities, other parts of their life.

And then there is compatibility. Sometimes two people care about each other deeply and still struggle to build a friendship that feels good for both of them. One person needs closeness while the other values independence. One seeks verbal reassurance while the other believes actions speak louder than words. One wants deep conversations while the other connects through activities. Compatibility doesn’t necessarily mean speaking the same language of care. Sometimes it means being willing and able to learn each other’s language. I know texting isn’t natural for you. Would one message every couple of weeks be feasible? I know you don’t enjoy emotional conversations. Could we have one now and then? That kind of adaptation can itself be a form of care.

But there are limits. Not every friendship can be negotiated into existence. Sometimes our languages of care don’t overlap enough. If constant adaptation requires one person to become someone they are not, the friendship can become exhausting. And sometimes letting go is also an act of care. We can recognize that two people may care about each other and still not be able to give each other the kind of friendship they need.

So care is not simply one ingredient of friendship. It is the thread that runs through all of them. Care creates safety. Safety allows trust. Trust makes vulnerability possible. Patience gives trust and vulnerability time to grow. Communication helps us understand how care is given and received. Mutuality allows care to move in both directions. Freedom keeps care from becoming possession. And compatibility tells us whether two people’s ways of caring can actually coexist. That’s why friendship isn’t simply a status of “ we’re friends”, but an ongoing practice of care. Indeed, friendships can deepen, fade, recover, or end not necessarily because the label changes, but because the practice does.

When you are away from home, you may urgently need deep friendships. So, take those friendships seriously. Make space for them. Prioritise them, communicate about your needs, and ask for what you need. Give too. Learn how the other person gives and receives care, and recognise those with whom you can build it. Be patient, but do not confuse patience with passivity. Pay attention to reciprocity and compatibility. And when you have rebuilt that foundation of belonging, you become freer to enjoy all the other kinds of friendship, without asking each one to save you from loneliness.

We don’t need every friendship to become home. But when we are far from home, I think we do need some friendships that help us build one. When friendship bears the burden of that belonging, the question shifts from « Who are my friends? » to “With whom do I feel safe enough to be truly myself? ».

With love, always,

R-D