004: Why Is Expat Life So Lonely?
3 Steps to Finding Your Girl Gang Abroad
If I have one superpower, it’s this: drop me anywhere in the world, and I’ll find girlfriends to hold me tf down.
As an expat, friendships aren’t just social—they’re essential. When you don’t have immediate family around, your friends become your anchor and lifeline.
After a few weeks of working together at a surf shop in Australia, my friend Amy took me in when I was *this close* 👌 to being homeless. She let me stay with her and her two young kids.
Me and Amy, my literal life saver and one of my dearest friends in Aus.
I will never forget the kindness my female friends have extended to me, both in dramatic ways (giving me a place to stay) and in the everyday (checking in, driving me to the airport, hyping me up after a breakup).
So today’s newsletter is dedicated to female friendship in celebration of Galentine’s day (with an expat twist, of course)!
Female Friendships & The Loneliness Epidemic
Research shows that close female friendships boost self-worth, empowerment, and overall wellness. And it’s not about how many friends you have, but how deep those connections go.
But here’s the problem: we are in a loneliness epidemic. In recent years, 1 in 2 adults has reported feeling lonely, resulting in anxiety and depression. It doesn’t just have psychological effects, but physical ones too. Loneliness is as toxic as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Loneliness is even more exasperated amongst expats. A study by AXA – Global Healthcare found that nearly 87% of expats have felt isolated during their time abroad. The primary reasons cited include missing friends and family, language barriers, lack of a local support network, and challenges in acclimating to a new environment.
👉 The toughest hurdle to moving abroad is not the logistical barriers, but rather the emotional ones, specifically around loneliness and isolation.
💌 In today’s newsletter…
I’m breaking down how to find your people in a new country—specifically, how to build female friendships to fight off expat loneliness.
I’ve broken it into three steps: Awareness, Proactiveness, Maintenance.
Step 1: Awareness
Loneliness is an unavoidable part of the expat experience. Remember that moving to a new country is a transformative process, one that will make you alien to your friends and family back home- and even to yourself. You are becoming someone new, adjusting to a new place, people, language and culture. Of course you’re going to feel isolated. Just don’t take it personally — it’ll pass. It’s a part of the initiation into expathood.
Step 2: Proactiveness
Unfortunately, there is no quick fix for creating meaningful friendships and a solid network, just good ol’ time and effort. But you’ve got to start somewhere.
👉Here’s what I’d suggest: figure out what your interests are and find groups, whether it be online or irl, that share them.
Facebook groups – Join interest-based communities & expat groups in your area. Post an intro on these pages saying you’re looking for likeminded people to hang out with. For example, when I first moved to New Zealand, I joined Auckland Girl Network and saw Andrea’s intro which resonated with me, I asked to grab coffee and we’ve been fast friends ever since!
Andrea and I on a hot girl walk in New Zealand at Shakespear National Park.
Another Broad Abroad Substack community! Make a friend with another abroad girlie 💖 Please feel free to introduce yourself and use our subscriber group chat to talk about anything related to your experience moving or living abroad. 🫶
Meetup - This is like an online marketplace for events happening in your area, and it’s especially great for finding interest-based events, like day hikes, language exchange, book clubs, etc.
Bumble BFF - If you can swipe right to find a date, you can do it to find a friend too, using Bumble’s less… intimate version!
Join a sports club/ social team- This is my #1 hack for making friends fast. Sports create regular interactions and working toward a shared goal builds friendships naturally. When I moved to Newcastle, I joined a club volleyball team—they became my people on and off the court.
My volleyball team, Get Diggity 🙌🏻
Step 3: Maintenance
A rule of thumb I use when building connections: If you want a friend, you have to be a friend first, meaning you need to embody the kind of friend you want in order to attract the friendships you desire—because how you show up for others teaches them how to show up for you.
✅ Make an effort—don’t just wait for them to reach out
✅ Be open minded and curious
✅ Be intentional about quality time
The friendships you build abroad can change your entire experience. They can be the difference between feeling isolated or feeling at home.
So if you’re lonely, remember: it’s just a phase. You will find your people—but you have to put yourself in the spaces where they can find you too.
💖Where are you from?
Kazakhstan
💖Where have you lived?
I’ve lived in Toulouse, France right after school and now living in Auckland, NZ
💖What’s a small daily habit or ritual you’ve picked up from your new culture?
I’ve brought ethnic Kazakh cushion covers and have them in my house. Also love listening to Kazakh music - my kiwi partner is into it now too
💖Have you ever had a moment where you thought about moving back? Why or why not?
Yes. Whenever I go back - I think about coming to live for a year or so with my finance. Honestly people. My best friends are there. And I’m more used to the friendship culture back home - we hang out all the time whereas I feel like in NZ people don’t spend that much time with their friends
💖What’s a local phrase or slang word you’ve totally embraced?
Thingamajig - made me laugh when I first heard it and now I love it
💖📲Follow Luara on Instagram @laurarakhimova_
If you follow me on IG, you’ll know that I’m currently in Bali! Im currently editing this newsletter at 1AM Bali time. Feeling pretty masochistic for writing this newsletter so late whilst on vacation, but after drinking some espresso martinis at dinner, i decided i was going to rock and roll to get this done.
I’ve been having a pretty epic time here, though the rain has been basically non-stop. I’m here with my partner and his family who flew in from Belgium. We’ve been dotting around between mainland in Seminyak and Nusa Lembongan, an island on the west side of Bali. We’ll be traveling early tomorrow to go to Ubud where we’ve rented out a house next to the rice terraces. We’ll be exploring temples and doing some surfing!
More updates to come 🫶
For now I’m headed to bed! I’ll catchya next time 😘😴
Xx, Juvi
Great tips Juvi! Its all about taking the initiative.
I lived in Dublin, Ireland for three months as an American Broad Abroad when I was twenty. It was the most dynamic, exciting time in my entire social life––I had a close-knit group of friends who lived in my apartment building and we ate dinner together every night, in addition to attending school together, hitting our local bars and clubs together, and traveling throughout Ireland and mainland Europe together. A habitually lonely person (who, particularly in my early twenties, often felt like a perpetual outsider in social groups) I never felt more like I belonged than I did amid this group, in this country.
When my time in Ireland came to an end and I said goodbye to my friends, I took a three-week solo trip to Italy. T Although I spent some days with (distant) family there, I was alone almost the entire time. I was very poor, sleeping in cheap hotels without central heat or on hostel floors, and eating one meal a day; I also didn't speak Italian very well, and would go hours, if not entire days, without meaningfully communicating with another people. In a lifetime of loneliness, this three-week period was among the most desolate in my life. (I had learned, in Dublin, of an Irish custom: whenever you enter a church for the first time, take a bit of the holy water from the baptismal fount and bless yourself and make three wishes. When I went to Italy I toured a lot of churches; in every single one I went into, I performed the custom, and made the same single wish, imbuing it with the power of all three: I wished that time would go faster so that I could go home and not be alone anymore). The contrast in my life in the two countries was dramatic, and made the loneliness I felt in Italy all the more painful.
Looking back at that time, I feel profoundly grateful for the experience that I had––not only to have spent so much time in Italy, which is a gorgeous country full of gorgeous history, culture, language, art, food, people, and spirit––but to have spent so much time with myself. Experiences of isolation can be among the most instructive: even if you don't feel like you "learn" anything about yourself when you're lonely, you learn how to survive your loneliness, to engage with it, to persist through it. As poet Ocean Vuong tells us, "Loneliness is still time spent with the world." That's not to say that a Broad Abroad shouldn't prioritize finding friends––it's absolutely essential, as you delineate so well here––but that the loneliness that precedes the connection is essential, too.