Expat Friendships (Revisited)
This week, I will republish an article from The Expat Life archives. The topic, expat friendships, has become more relevant to me recently.
And what, you may be asking, has prompted this early morning navel diving? Each day as I journal, I begin with a reminder from Jim Rohn: We become the five people we spend the most time with.
In my journal, I wrote:
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Grateful for recognizing that all conditions - my plans and the world around me, including inside my home and my relationships - are constantly changing. Just focus on accomplishing the work, not the path I use to complete it. Even the people who are important currently will probably be gone. Or, as Derek Sivers wrote in his pithy How To Live, be prepared for next year to be much worse.
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It began with the predawn realization of how fleeting our experiences and our relationships are. Lasting friendships are rare animals indeed and even the closest relationships usually tend to be more like two ships sailing on parallel courses before diverging. Next, I began thinking of how my family relationships have been changing recently. Children, like graduate student assistants, tend to grow up and move away from us, choosing their own paths and leaving us behind.
Next in the stream of consciousness stream: As I acerbically observed in my series on monogamous lifetime marriages, Mr. or Ms. Right may be the perfect match… but usually only for a short time before inexorable changes wrought by diverging careers, increasing age, changing values, completed goals, or mere saturation mean that, soon enough, Mr/Ms Right will be a tiny, twinkling ship’s light on the horizon, connected only by a promise made long ago.
My stream of consciousness rambling then turned to two digital friendships that have evolved over the past year. These two guys are now like brothers to me. Then, I thought of the rest of the international community in my life. In the past few days, I have sent and received messages from Ukraine, Norway, USA, Peru, and New Zealand. Not so lonely that way.
Then I thought of Thor Heyerdahl and his seminal book, Kon-Tiki. Of diversity on the Kon-Tiki crew, he wrote, “No two of these men had met before, and they were all of entirely different types. That being so, we should have been on the raft for some weeks before we got tired of one another’s stories. No storm clouds with low pressure and gusty weather held greater menace for us than the danger of psychological cloudburst among six men shut up together for months on a drifting raft. In such circumstances a good joke was often as valuable as a life belt.”
Well, that type of diversity is certainly true of my digital Rohn Five Circle. None of these friends have met in person and they are entirely different types of personalities and lifestyles as well as occupying different time zones. But they are all first magnitude stars in my night sky. Or, as Derek Sivers wrote: On the internet, it is possible to find people just as weird as you.
Finally, I read the latest article by Ayushi in her substack account and wondered how two people so vastly different on every possible demographic index could communicate effectively. Ayushi’s Substack account, https://ayushimukhi.substack.com/, is highly recommended. She offers weekly musings that are poignant, introspective, dreamy, and always well-written.
Thinking of some of the issues and my reflections inspired by Ayushi’s latest article, I decided that the dynamics of life with relationship ships passing in the night - or, at best, running parallel courses for a brief time - is something to value this morning… and every morning. Enjoy, even cherish, them while they last. “The circle of life,” as Anton says.
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(From the archives) 19 Expat Friendships
One of the greatest benefits of being an expat is the set of opportunities to begin a totally new life, complete with new possessions, new routines, new job - and new friends. (Another huge benefit, a bicultural worldview, comes later). Old projects, old routines, old possessions, and old relationships must be abandoned when we start a new life as an expat. A word of warning: If you become an expat, beware of the hazard known as the “foreign ghetto”, a phenomenon where a group of foreigners choose to eat, live, shop, work, talk, seek entertainment, and generally spend all their time together. By all means, you want to blend some of the comfortable parts of your old life into your new life, and that comfort can come from being around people with a similar background, language, and experiences. But beware of that insidious foreign ghetto. You cannot explore and adopt the best of your new life if you spend all your time surrounded by only expats.
As you find close friends among the local residents or from the local expat community, remember the saying by Jim Rohn, “You become the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Choose your closest companions carefully. Invariably, they draw you into their orbits of behaviors, attitudes, and expectations. This does not always mean the people you consider your role models, Jim Rohn said “the five people you spend the most time with”.
As an expat, you must choose your new friends carefully indeed, lest you begin a slow and comfortable downward spiral in performance and self-image. Visualize playing basketball against a bunch of bumbling, fumbling first-graders. Not much of a contest. Visualize doing it repeatedly. Instead of developing your basketball skills and strength, you would decline because of the lack of any challengers.
I recall a dryly bitter comment by an expat teacher many years ago. “We’re all misfits or missionaries.” My friend Tom was definitely far from the missionary end of the spectrum. While his “all” label is debatable, there is no question that an expat typically finds the number of people available to be close friends will be considerably smaller than the large numbers of acquaintances he had in his old life.
So, how are we to find suitable, uplifting companions? One happy solution is to develop a local network of fellow expats with largely similar experiences and outlooks. Currently, my own group of expat friends meets weekly for our Friday luncheons of Western food, accompanied by acidic observations about local conditions, fashions, customs, caustic anecdotes about the skills of local drivers, and recalling old movies and music from our past days of glory. We call these weekly outbursts of companionship and nostalgia “burgers and bitching”. Roughly categorized as outcasts, unemployables, misfits, bad fits, reprobates, and English teachers, we democratically accept new members regardless of national background, assets, past experiences, or health issues - although we scrutinize the English teachers closely. Not every expat should expect to be so lucky as me. Finding your Rohn 5 circle of friends depends on many factors, including pure luck.
Now the good news. In modern times, when an expat is searching for friends, the pool of candidates also includes the billions of people available online. Assuming that you have internet access, you can assemble your circle of five Rohn companions to include digital friends. With the internet universe open to you, it is possible to find others with the same interests, foibles, and worldview as you – no matter how weird you are. Remember though, that Jim Rohn said the greatest influences will be the five people you spend the most time with. A few minutes interacting with a person online will not have the same impact on your behaviors as someone you spend several hours with. Find people on your own level or, if they will accept you, people on a slightly higher level than you. It is best to search for friends on your level, not mentors or role models or some form of hero.
But this matter of online companions raises yet another issue: Will the quality of such friendships be the same as face-to-face relationships? From personal experience, I believe this is so but only when the cumulative amount of time spent together is great enough to truly know and feel comfortable with someone. I asked Marc Reclau, a German who has been a successful expat author for many years. His response (digitally) was, “I don't know if online relationships are as powerful as the good old personal relationships from the good old days. Probably not. But I prefer an uplifting online relationship to a toxic personal relationship. I had a couple of online masterminds and they lifted every single member of the group up. And I did a lot of online coaching that worked. Still, nothing substitutes personal offline relationships.”
Regardless of where you stand on this online vs. face-to-face issue, it is good to have online friends as an option. Jim Rohn was right, we do become like the people we surround ourselves with. And Marc Reclau was right also. A toxic personal relationship is to be avoided at all costs.