You Made the Move: So Why Does It Sometimes Feel So Empty?

The photos look incredible. Sun-drenched terraces, cobblestone streets, and glasses of local wine at sunset. Then the comments pour in: "You're living my dream!" "I'm so jealous!" You smile because parts of this new life really are wonderful.

But then Sunday afternoon arrives, and you don’t have anywhere to be. Your phone shows no new messages — because back home, everyone is asleep or simply getting on with a life that no longer includes you.

For the first time, the adventure feels less like freedom and a little more like exile. Nobody warned you about this part.

The Loneliness Nobody Admits To

Loneliness is the great unspoken companion of expat life. It follows people who move abroad for retirement, work, love, or a fresh start. It doesn't matter how sociable they are, how prepared they were, or how much they wanted the change.

This loneliness isn’t the same as being alone. Many expats are surrounded by people. They go to language classes, join hiking groups, and make polite conversation at the local café.

But there's a particular hollowness that comes from being surrounded by people who don’t yet really know you. They haven’t heard your stories. They don’t share your references. They can’t quite place the person you were before you arrived.

Researchers distinguish between social loneliness (lacking a network of acquaintances) and emotional loneliness (lacking a deep bond with someone who truly knows you). Expats often solve the first problem within months. The second can take years — and for some, it never fully resolves.

When you move abroad, the community you spent years building disappears overnight. Suddenly, you have to rebuild your whole ecosystem from scratch. As an adult, in an unfamiliar environment, often in a language you’re still learning.

But adults aren’t wired for this the way children are. The process will be much slower and more effortful than most people expect.

Time Zones Swallow Your Old Friendships

When you moved abroad, you imagined staying close to the people you love. And you will, in a certain way.

Only the spontaneous phone call becomes a scheduled video chat. The quick coffee catch-up turns into a yearly trip. Gradually, without anyone meaning for it to happen, the connection thins out.

You might feel abandoned, especially when you’re struggling. The people you most want to call are asleep eight time zones away.

You're Starting Over at a Stage When Others Have Settled

For retirees, there's an added layer of complexity to this new life. Most of your potential neighbors and peers will already have their lives organized. They have friendships, routines, and families. They will be warm and welcoming, but they won’t necessarily be looking for a new best friend.

Breaking into established social circles as an outsider at 60 or 70 requires persistence and vulnerability. That can feel exhausting and, as hard as it is to admit, humiliating.

Identity Feels Slippery

Much of who we are is reflected back to us by the people around us. When you move abroad, you lose those mirrors.

The people who knew you as funny, capable, wise, or generous won’t be there anymore. In the new country, you will simply be a foreigner. A newcomer.

Someone whose accent makes people's faces tighten in concentration because they have a hard time understanding what you are trying to say. You will feel lost and almost invisible. Your identity and achievements will seem insignificant.

The Stages Most Expats Go Through

However, loneliness in a foreign country rarely occurs suddenly. It usually follows a familiar pattern.

The Honeymoon Phase

This phase comes first, lasting weeks to a few months. Everything is new and stimulating. The novelty of the grocery store, local markets, architecture, and food energizes you.

Then the Crash

This follows, often between three and nine months in. The novelty wears off. The daily frictions of expat life — bureaucracy, language barriers, and the exhaustion of constant translation — accumulate. This is when loneliness typically hits hardest. Many people wonder whether they made a terrible mistake.

The Rebuild

This stage is slower and less dramatic, but it’s where real life begins. You start forming genuine connections and making new friends. Your language skills improve. You set new routines. You begin to feel less like a visitor and more like a resident.

Integration

Integration doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten home or that all loneliness has disappeared. It means you’ve built enough of a local life that the good days start to outnumber the hard ones. When the hard days come, you have somewhere or someone to turn to.

Unfortunately, not everyone reaches this stage at the same speed. Some people return home before they even get there.

What Helps

Lower Your Expectations for How Fast It Happens

The single most damaging belief is that you should feel settled within a few months. Research on adult friendship and social integration suggests it takes, on average, around 50 hours of shared time to move from acquaintance to casual friend, and over 200 hours to develop a close friendship. That takes time. Months. Sometimes years.

You should give yourself permission to feel lonely for at least six months, if not a year, without concluding that something is wrong with you or your decision. Life abroad is rarely linear.

Pursue Interests, Not Just Expat Groups

Expat communities are invaluable. They understand your experience in a way locals often can’t. They are the most welcoming to newcomers.

But building a social life exclusively within the expat bubble can delay true integration. It can create a kind of suspended identity, always between two worlds.

So, mix it up. Join a local choir, a sports team, a volunteering project, or a cooking class run in the local language. Shared purpose is one of the fastest routes to genuine human connection. Mixing with locals will give you an anchor in your new home that your expat friends — who may themselves move on — cannot provide.

Maintain Home Relationships Intentionally

Don’t wait for distance to dissolve your closest relationships. You will have to be proactive to maintain friendships. You might be the one to schedule calls, plan visits, write emails, send text messages, and leave voice messages.

The people who knew you before you left are irreplaceable repositories of your history and identity. Keeping those connections alive isn’t clinging to the past; it’s maintaining the foundation on which your new life is being built.

Be Honest About How You're Feeling

The tendency among expats is to perform happiness. You might do this for the people back home who are living vicariously through you, for new acquaintances you don’t yet trust with vulnerability, and sometimes for yourself.

Admitting that you’re lonely feels like admitting the adventure was a mistake. It isn’t. Loneliness is not a verdict on your decision. It is a natural, temporary, and nearly universal part of building a new life somewhere new.

Saying it out loud to a trusted person, in an expat community forum, or to a therapist will make it less of a burden.

Consider Professional Support

Online therapy has made it easier than ever to continue working with a counselor in your home language, regardless of where you live. Platforms offering English-language therapy are widely available and accessible from almost anywhere.

You don’t need to reach a certain level of suffering to seek help. Transition and grief — moving abroad involves real grief, even if it’s also joyful — are completely valid reasons to seek support.

A Note for Partners and Families

Loneliness abroad is rarely distributed equally between partners. Often, one person made the decision to move — and the other followed, sacrificing their own network, career, or community in the process.

The partner who followed may feel unable to complain because the move was supposed to be what they both wanted. They may feel guilty for struggling, while the person who is thriving may not realize their partner isn’t.

Regular, honest conversations about how each person is actually doing — not just logistically, but emotionally — will matter more abroad than they did at home.

The Other Side of It

People who come out the other side of that difficult first year often describe a quality of self-knowledge and resilience they didn’t have before. They’ve learned they can build something from nothing.

They’ve discovered who their real friends are — the ones who stayed in touch across the distance. They’ve learned to reach toward strangers, tolerate uncertainty, and find meaning in small pleasures.

The friendships that do form abroad — forged in the particular crucible of shared displacement and mutual vulnerability — can be extraordinarily deep.

You’re not bonding over proximity or habit. You’re bonding over the strange, brave, occasionally bewildering choice you both made to go and build a life somewhere new. That should count for something.

If You're Struggling Right Now

If you’re in the thick of it — if Sunday afternoons feel too long and the honeymoon has faded — know that almost everyone who has done this has stood exactly where you’re standing.

It does not mean you made a mistake. It means you’re in the middle of something difficult, which is not the same thing.

Just keep in mind that the middle is not the end.

If loneliness is significantly affecting your well-being, speaking with a mental health professional is always a worthwhile step. Online therapy platforms offer English-language support from anywhere in the world.

An expatriate author living in Los Angeles, Alphonsine writes about the emotional journey of moving abroad. Her latest book, Starting a New Life Abroad: From Honeymoon Phase to Commitment, uses the language of romantic relationships to guide readers through the stages of the expat journey. www.alphonsinepelletier.com