when belonging abroad doesn't look the way you expected

When I first moved to Amsterdam back in 2002, it was for a job. I didn't know anyone in The Netherlands. Looking back, I realise how fortunate that timing was. Because, where I worked, we were mostly expats and there was a culture of "work hard, play hard". Almost as soon as I landed at my desk during that first week, I was invited to join a group of colleagues on a Friday night out. I hadn't had time to wonder how I was going to meet people because it happened almost automatically. My working life and my social life overlapped in a way that made belonging feel surprisingly easy. Some of those friendships lasted long after Amsterdam, even as we gradually moved to different countries and contact became less frequent.

That changed when I left my job because of health reasons and started my first business. Suddenly I was on my own. I decided that if I wanted people to know about my business, I'd have to network. That's what business owners did, wasn't it? I went along to networking groups, often seeing the same faces week after week, hoping that familiarity would eventually become comfort. And yet, it never really did. Networking wasn't something that came naturally to me, however I kept going because I thought I was doing what was expected. I would hang around the back of the room trying to stay away from everyone or find someone I already knew and stick to them for most of the evening.

Then came Switzerland, and everything shifted again. For five years I practically became a hermit. I hadn't made any friends, nor had I made any effort to make friends. Reading that back almost sounds bleak, however it genuinely wasn't. I was happy. It was what I needed during that season of my life, and I didn't feel as though anything was missing.

Then, by the time we moved to Salzburg, arriving in the middle of Covid, even if I'd wanted to meet people, there wasn't really an opportunity. Like everyone else, life narrowed for a while. Once restrictions lifted, though, I realised that I needed human interaction beyond that of my husband. I wasn't looking for a packed social calendar. I simply realised that one person, however much you love them, can't be your entire world.

By chance, I came across a Facebook group that organised a weekly Wednesday coffee morning. It took me a few weeks to build up the courage to go. I can still remember that first Wednesday as though it were yesterday. Everyone was incredibly welcoming. People introduced themselves, included me in conversations and made sure I didn't spend the morning sitting on my own.

As the weeks passed, though, something else naturally happened. The conversations gradually became the conversations of people who already knew one another. Shared memories surfaced. Someone would ask about something that had happened the previous week. Someone else would continue a conversation that had begun long before I ever walked into the room. It wasn't intentional. It was simply what happens when people have history together. I was there, sitting among everyone, yet I still felt slightly outside what was happening.

The more often I went, though, the more familiar some of the ladies became and the easier those Wednesday mornings felt. At the same time, there were days when the group was quite large and a few bigger personalities naturally filled the room. On those mornings I found myself shrinking into my shell and participating less. I listened far more than I spoke.

Then summer arrived. Holiday season meant attendance dropped dramatically. One Wednesday it turned out that only I and one regular Canadian woman were planning to come. I actually suggested we didn't bother meeting because I didn't want her making the journey into town just for me. In comparison, I was only a fifteen-minute bike ride away. However, she said she was coming anyway.

I remember wondering whether I'd be able to keep a conversation going for long enough. Would she find me boring? Would there be awkward silences once we'd covered the obvious topics? However, none of that happened.

We clicked almost immediately. Some of it was practical. For both of us, English was our first language. We were also both married to German-speaking husbands. So, instinctively, we understood each other's humour and recognised so many of the little cultural moments that don't always need explaining when someone has lived something similar.

That coffee morning became one of the best I'd attended.

Not long afterwards, we decided to start meeting on Fridays as well. Gradually the group grew to four women, and we jokingly called ourselves the FWOGS: Foreign Wives of German Speakers. The size of the group suited me. There was room for everyone in the conversation.

Fridays felt completely different. The group was small enough that everyone naturally had space to speak. Conversations wandered wherever they wandered. We laughed about things that probably wouldn't have sounded funny to anyone else. We talked about life, our marriages, living in a German-speaking country and all the little things that come with building a life somewhere that wasn't where you started.

Without really noticing it happening, those Friday mornings became something I looked forward to. I still went to the Wednesday coffee mornings, largely out of loyalty to the group that had welcomed me when I knew no one, however somewhere along the way I realised that the Fridays gave me something I hadn't found in the larger gatherings. They gave me a sense of belonging I'd never managed to force through networking or by repeatedly turning up somewhere simply because I thought I should.

When it came time for my husband and I to move again, this time to Frankfurt, people quite naturally started asking whether I'd found any local groups yet. Some friends even researched groups for me and kindly sent me the details. I joined several, partly because I appreciated the effort they'd gone to and partly because it seemed like the obvious thing to do after moving somewhere new.

The pressure, though, felt surprisingly strong. One friend had also moved countries several times. Whenever she arrived somewhere new, building a social life became her first priority. It worked beautifully for her. Watching that, I couldn't help wondering why I wasn't motivated in the same way. Why wasn't I eager to start all over again? Why did I feel guilty for not wanting to? For a while, I wondered what was wrong with me. I thought perhaps I was doing life abroad the wrong way. Only much later did I stop measuring my way of belonging against someone else's.

These days I spend around ten weeks working deeply in my business and exploring Frankfurt and the surrounding area either on my own or with Dennis. Then I head back down to Salzburg for a few days with the FWOGS, catching up on everything we've missed since the last visit.

Over more than twenty years of living abroad, my approach to having a social life has moved from one extreme to another. There was the ease of Amsterdam, where belonging almost arrived before I'd unpacked my suitcase. There was Switzerland, where very little social contact suited me perfectly. Then Salzburg showed me something I hadn't recognised before: belonging didn't arrive because I found the biggest group, it arrived because I found the right people.

There can be an unspoken expectation when you live abroad that building a successful life means building a busy social life. That if you haven't found a large circle of friends, you're somehow missing an important part of the experience. Yet life has quietly shown me that belonging doesn't always look the same from one season to the next, and it doesn't need to. Capability actually has little to do with it. A woman can know how to introduce herself, join groups and make friends, yet still discover those spaces don't offer the kind of connection she's actually looking for.

If you've found yourself wondering why everyone else seems more motivated to keep meeting new people than you are, perhaps there's nothing unusual about that at all. Perhaps you're simply discovering what genuinely fits you rather than what looks right from the outside.

That understanding has shaped much of the work I now do through my Personal Support sessions, where conversations often begin with one question and gradually uncover something much quieter beneath it. Sometimes the uncertainty isn't about making more friends or saying yes to more invitations. It's about trusting your own way of moving through the world. In a similar way, my Return to Self-Worth Soul-Layered Meditation was created for moments when you've drifted away from your own inner knowing and need somewhere steady to return.

Whenever I travel back to Salzburg and sit down with the FWOGS, it never feels as though I'm returning to a checklist of friendships I've successfully maintained. Instead, it simply feels like returning to people with whom I don't have to work quite so hard to belong.