I realise this is the kind of question that will elicit completely different answers depending on each person personal situation, but anyway, I am curious to hear about other people’s stories.
I have been living in the UK for nearly eight years and I can’t say I have one really close friend who is British, and this is despite being very well integrated here (my partner is English).
I’ve heard endless experiences from other expats that are similar to mine, where most if not all their closest friends are other expats. This could be just a London thing, simply because of the amount of foreigners here. Also I am in my mid fourties, so establishing meaningful relationships is simply harder (no offense, but I am not that interested about hearing how you, a 20 something, has plenty of British friends).
I am not asking how to make friends, thank you, I can figure out that joining a club or volunteering or whatever is a great way. I am mostly curious to hear from others if this is a common experience.
Absolutely typical.
Friends of mine moved to Bristol for University, and despite promises of ‘university life’ and so on, managed to finish their degrees, get jobs, move to Brighton, and I’m pretty sure they live in a house made up exclusively of European expats who have essentially not managed to make any great British friends over the course of 6 years of living there.
As an Expat (Specifically, a Brit who moved to their country and made friends with them before they moved to ‘my’ country, I don’t think it’s their fault - personal experience shows me they have no issue making friends with Brits. It’s more that as an expat, you tend to gravitate towards others who have similar lifestyles/experiences, and those tend to be expats.
Wherever I’ve lived in the past, my circle has typically been made up of ‘internationals’ - all of us are just foreigners trying to make it in a strange land, and it is comforting being able to instantly click over shared experiences such as how fucking mental visa paperwork is, or how difficult it is to buy (product X) outside of your home country.
I don’t think many other Brits who’ve never left the island would understand how tempted I was to let the Dutch try deport my British/French dual national kids when we were resident there because I hadn’t bothered with the art 50 paperwork for them (given that the gemeinde had them registered as dual nationals) and the burger registration database was only capable of sending one nationality to the immigration department and the town hall team responsible for making the change to make the French nationality the primary one just plain refused to make the three keystrokes necessary.