Making friends abroad as an adult requires different skills than making friends as a kid. Kids: proximity is enough. You're in the same class? Friends. Adults: proximity creates acquaintances. Shared values create friends. When you move abroad, you're desperate for connection. So you befriend whoever's available: parents at school, neighbors, people in expat groups. That's how you end up investing time in people you discover—months later—you fundamentally disagree with about everything important. COVID taught me to filter fast. Throw out a "what do you think about..." and watch how they respond. If they start spouting conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, or values incompatible with mine—I know immediately. No need to waste 6 months discovering we're not actually compatible. Sounds harsh. It's efficient. Because making friends abroad shouldn't be about convenience. It should be about building global relationships worth maintaining across continents. Friends you meet in Madrid even though you both live elsewhere. Friends your kids text daily despite time zones. Friends you coordinate international trips with because you'd rather travel to see THEM than travel to see places. That's forever friendship. Not "we're friends because we happen to be in the same city right now." Most people settle for proximity friends. Then lose all their friendships every time they move because the relationships were location-dependent, not values-aligned. Filter early. Invest in people who pass the filter. Build friendships that transcend geography. Your kids will have best friends they meet in Tokyo and celebrate birthdays with in Paris. You'll have people you'd fly across continents to see. That's making friends abroad done right. Link in bio when you're ready to build global friendships instead of settling for convenient ones. 🆘🇺🇸 #TikTokCreatorSearchInsightsIncentive
@nomadveronicaTranscript
Let's talk about making friends abroad as an American who moved overseas five years ago. I have a lot of opinions about how to make friends and what it is that you can do to make better friends in the process. A lot of my friends end up coming from my kids' school community and they end up being proximity friends. It's people that are just around and are doing the same thing our kids are doing and those people aren't necessarily people I would choose actively if I had all the choices in the world and a lot of that is because we don't align on major elements of what we believe and that to me means that we aren't going to really be lifelong friends. So during COVID I developed this skill of throwing shit against the wall and see what stuck. I would say things to sort of elicit what other people's opinions were about COVID and how the procedures were going just to see what they thought and that gave me as much information as I needed to see how much effort I was going to put into that particular friendship. So if they were starting to spout off shit about Iver Mectin and how the vaccines are going to cause autism then I knew immediately that we're not going to vibe right that was my way of understanding that this was not a forever friend this was just someone that was going to be around because they're in the community that I'm currently in. So as you are moving abroad I definitely suggest right in the beginning get the major things out of the way find out their political beliefs find out their religious beliefs find out their beliefs about marriage and family because you don't want your kids to be spending time in houses where they are going to get weird information like indoctrinated with trump earth stuff and religious nonsense if that's not how you feel. But one of the great things about making friends abroad is that because they live abroad they understand the lifestyle in a way that your friends back home don't. So you have opportunities to create dynamic relationship where you're meeting up with people and that can even translate to your children as well because we're the kind of family who's now lived on three different continents we allow our children to stay friends with people that they really connect with. So my daughter's best friend from Tokyo even though we've moved to Portugal we met up with that friend in Paris for their birthday so that they could celebrate together because they were so close for the years that we were in Tokyo. So be strategic about making friends abroad and don't just let proximity friends end up taking up all of your time find the people who you truly vibe with that you can become global forever friends with.
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