New city, no one to call: loneliness after moving abroad

According to the United Nations, about 281 million people were living outside the country of their birth in 2020. Students in Melbourne and Manchester, nurses in Dubai, engineers in Toronto, construction workers in Riyadh, families in Berlin. They come from everywhere and they move for every reason, but a great many of them share one experience in the first months: an evening in a new room, with a phone full of contacts in the wrong time zone, and nobody nearby to call.

If that is you right now, two things are worth knowing. It is extremely common. And it has a shape, which means it usually changes.

The curve everyone draws, and what it gets wrong

The term "culture shock" was popularised by the anthropologist Kalervo Oberg in the 1950s. He described a sequence that has since been repeated in countless orientation sessions: a honeymoon of excitement, then a crisis of frustration and homesickness, then gradual recovery and adjustment. Around the same time, the Norwegian sociologist Sverre Lysgaard had studied Norwegian scholars in the United States and noticed something similar: adjustment seemed to start well, dip, then climb again. It became known as the U-curve.

The trouble is that when researchers went looking for the U-curve, they often did not find it. In a 1998 study titled "The U-curve on trial", Colleen Ward and colleagues followed Japanese students in New Zealand from their arrival and found that difficulties were greatest at the very beginning and then eased, with no honeymoon at all. Many people do not get a glamorous first month. They get a hard one.

That matters, because people who expect a honeymoon can mistake a normal rough start for proof that the move was a mistake. It usually is not. It is just the start.

Two kinds of loneliness

In 1973 the sociologist Robert Weiss drew a distinction that explains a lot about life abroad. He separated two kinds of loneliness, which feel similar and need different things.

International students are a well-studied example. In a 2008 study of 200 international students in Australia, Erlenawati Sawir and colleagues found that around two-thirds had experienced loneliness or isolation, and that many felt both kinds: cut off from family and partners at home, and without a network in their new country. The fix for one is not the fix for the other, so it helps to work on both.

A plan for the first months

Friendship grows mostly from repetition: seeing the same people again and again until a familiar face becomes a person you know. You cannot rush that, but you can set it up. One simple plan:

1. Pick one weekly fixture. A class, a sports club, a religious or community group, a language exchange evening. Go every week, even when you do not feel like it. Familiarity does the work.
2. Find a third place. The sociologist Ray Oldenburg used that phrase for spots that are neither home nor work, like a cafe, a park bench or a barber, where regulars gather. Become a regular somewhere.
3. Book calls home on a schedule. Time zones make spontaneous calls hard. A fixed weekly call protects the emotional side while the social side grows.
4. Talk to someone every day. Not a transaction, a conversation. Some days that will be a neighbour or a colleague. On the empty evenings, it can be a stranger online, in your own language or in the local one.
5. Say yes early. The first invitations come in the first months. Accept them, even the slightly awkward ones. Later, people's circles close up again.

And keep an eye on yourself. Homesickness is normal. Weeks of low mood, poor sleep or losing interest in everything are worth taking to a doctor or a student support service, which in most countries exist precisely for this.

You crossed a border to build something. The first months are often the loneliest part of that, and also the part that passes. Who is the one person, here or at home, you could talk to tonight?

Sources: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, International Migrant Stock 2020; Oberg, K. (1960), "Cultural shock: Adjustment to new cultural environments", Practical Anthropology; Lysgaard, S. (1955), "Adjustment in a foreign society: Norwegian Fulbright grantees visiting the United States", International Social Science Bulletin; Ward, C., Okura, Y., Kennedy, A. & Kojima, T. (1998), "The U-curve on trial: A longitudinal study of psychological and sociocultural adjustment during cross-cultural transition", International Journal of Intercultural Relations; Weiss, R. S. (1973), Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation; Sawir, E. et al. (2008), "Loneliness and international students: An Australian study", Journal of Studies in International Education; Oldenburg, R. (1989), The Great Good Place.