When I was 23 and backpacking through Southeast Asia, making friends was automatic. You sat at a hostel bar. Someone said something. By Thursday you had an inside joke and a loose plan to meet in Vietnam. It required almost no effort because the circumstances did all the work.
At 34, living in a rented flat in Lisbon, that easy social engine was gone. I had no hostel bar. I had no shared dorm full of people in identical situations. I had a desk, a lease, a weekly video call with my boss, and a creeping awareness that I had been in the city for three months without a single friendship that got past coworking-space small talk.
Nobody writes honestly about this. The expat content is all "community" and "connections" and "putting yourself out there." None of it addresses the real problem, which is that making genuine friends in your thirties, in a country where you have no history, is structurally hard in a way that no amount of personality can fully fix.
Why it gets harder after thirty
When you are young and travelling, friendships form through proximity and shared chaos. You are in the same hostel. You are both a bit lost. The barrier to connection is almost zero because neither of you has anything else demanding your time.
In your thirties, that changes completely. You have a routine. You have work. You have habits that you are not going to rearrange for a stranger. And the other people around you, the ones who also live abroad, have the same constraints.
More importantly, the selection pool is different. Backpackers are mostly similar. Expats in their thirties are wildly varied. You might be sitting next to a 36-year-old marketing manager from Berlin who listens to the same music and laughs at the same things, or a 33-year-old crypto evangelist who wants to pitch you on passive income within ten minutes. The filtering process takes longer, and it requires more effort, because the overlap is no longer assumed.
The revolving door
The hardest part of expat friendship is not making the initial connection. It is the turnover.
In every city I lived in, I watched the same cycle. You meet someone, spend a month becoming actual friends, start having meals together, and then they leave. They move on. Their visa runs out. Their remote job shifts them to another city. Their lease ends and they try somewhere cheaper.
In Lisbon, I counted six people in my first year who I genuinely connected with. Five of them left within eight months. One stayed, and she became the anchor of my entire social life there.
That revolving door is exhausting. Not because any single departure is painful. But because the accumulation of it makes you cautious. You start unconsciously calculating how long someone is going to be around before deciding whether to invest in knowing them. That is not a healthy way to approach people, but it is a rational response to a situation where most connections have an expiry date.
What looked useful and wasn't
Networking events. These always sounded promising and nearly always disappointed. The energy was transactional from the start. People showed up to exchange value, not to become friends. I met plenty of interesting professionals at them and made exactly no real friends.
Coworking space socialising. Better, but still limited. You end up with a set of acquaintances you can eat lunch with, which is useful but not the same thing. The coworking space produces proximity without intimacy.
Language exchanges. In theory, a great idea. In practice, the dynamic was often lopsided. One person wanted English practice. The other wanted friendship. Those are not the same motivation.
"Just go out more." This is the advice people give when they have no actual advice. Going out more without a structure or a reason does not produce friendships. It produces awkward solo drinks.
What actually built friendships
The things that produced real friendships shared one quality: repeated, unforced time together.
A weekly football game in a public park in Lisbon. We played every Saturday morning. The first month was strangers running badly. By the third month, six of us were having coffee afterwards and talking properly. By the sixth month, three of those people were the closest friends I had in the city.
A cooking group that met every two weeks. Someone started it in a WhatsApp group for residents in our neighbourhood. We rotated flats. The food was often terrible. The conversations were good because you were stuck in someone's kitchen for two hours with no polite way to leave.
A volunteer project at a community garden. I had never gardened in my life. I learned to grow tomatoes. I also met four people I am still in contact with, which is a better return on investment than any networking event I have ever attended.
That, more than anything else, was the common thread: repeated contact, a shared activity that was not work, and no pressure to perform or pitch. Those three things were worth more than a hundred first conversations.
Locals are a different challenge
Making friends with locals is different again, and in some countries substantially harder.
In Portugal, locals were friendly but rarely available. Their social lives were already full. They had family, existing friends, commitments that stretched back decades. Fitting a newcomer into that structure was not rude to refuse. It was just impractical.
In Colombia, it was the opposite. People were genuinely warm and socially generous. Invitations came quickly. But the depth took longer than you expected, partly because of the language gap and partly because the pace of social life was different.
The best local friendships I made in any country came through shared activity, not through going out. Working on something together, helping someone with a practical problem, joining a local group that was not specifically for expats. Those contexts bypassed the awkward first-meeting energy and created something closer to how friendships form naturally.
If I had to restart in a new city
Lower your expectations for the first three months. You will feel lonely. That is normal and it does not mean you are doing it wrong.
Find one recurring activity with the same group of people. Not a one-off event. Something weekly or fortnightly that does not require you to reinvent the social wheel each time.
Accept that most people you meet will leave. Invest anyway. The alternative is insulating yourself, and that leads somewhere much worse.
And stop comparing it to your twenties. That was a different life with a different structure. The friendships you make in your thirties abroad are fewer, slower, and often better. They just take longer to start.