The Art of Saying Goodbye | Expat Friendships Abroad

Somewhere between here and there

Why Expat Friendships End — and Why We Keep Starting Them Anyway

The Belonging Project — Part 4

The question you learn not to ask

One of the first things you learn living abroad is not to ask certain questions too early.

How long are you here?

Are you staying?

What happens next?

Not because the answers are rude — but because they rearrange the emotional furniture before you’ve even decided where to sit.

In expat life, every friendship carries an unspoken asterisk.A quiet awareness that this might not last. Or that it might — but only for a while.

You feel it early on. And once you notice it, it’s hard to unsee.

Fast bonds, fast endings

Expat friendships often move quickly.

You bond fast because you have to. There’s shared displacement, shared learning curves, shared absurdities. You skip the polite outer layers and move straight to the parts that matter. The conversations that would normally take years happen over coffee in month three.

And then — just as quickly — people leave.

A contract ends. A posting changes. A family goes “home” (wherever that now is).Another leaving do. Another set of photos. Another promise to stay in touch.

The rhythm becomes familiar.It never becomes painless.

The quiet accumulation of loss

What rarely gets named is the cumulative effect of these goodbyes.

Each one carries a small grief — not dramatic, not public, but persistent. It’s the loss of shared routines, shorthand jokes, and people who understood this specific version of your life.

Because expat friendships don’t usually end cleanly. They dissolve into time zones, memory, and messages that grow thinner with distance.

Over time, that loss adds up.

The instinct to protect yourself

Eventually, many expats develop a protective instinct.

You invest more carefully.

You keep things lighter.

You stop leaning all the way in — just in case.

It’s not cynicism.

It’s self-preservation.

When you’ve said goodbye often enough, you start rationing emotional energy. You convince yourself it’s easier not to get too close, not to rely too much, not to let friendships take up too much space.

This is where the unspoken calculation begins.

The false economy of emotional safety

Because here’s the problem: emotional self-protection works.

It does reduce the pain of goodbye.But it also reduces everything else.

The joy.

The intimacy.

The feeling of being fully seen.

Life becomes easier to manage — but thinner. You stay connected, but not deeply. Social, but slightly removed. Present, but not fully involved.

And quietly, you realise that a life built only on surface-level friendships is a thinner one.

What are you actually protecting yourself from?

This is the uncomfortable question expat life eventually asks.

What are you protecting yourself from?

Not pain — pain is inevitable.

Not loss — loss happens regardless.

You’re protecting yourself from attachment.

From visibility.

From being changed by other people.

And that protection comes at a cost.

Because you never really know who will leave quickly — and who will stay. Some people move on fast. Others remain for years. Some drift away emotionally long before they go anywhere physically. There is no reliable early-warning system.

So withholding yourself doesn’t actually make you safer.

It just guarantees less depth.

Choosing connection anyway

At some point, many expats make a quiet, conscious choice.

To keep investing.

To keep opening the door.

To keep showing up fully — even knowing it may end.

It isn’t naïve.

It’s deliberate.

Because loving people temporarily still matters. Because shared chapters count, even if they’re short. Because the alternative — emotional distance — costs more than it saves.

Friendship doesn’t fail because it ends

In expat life, endings are not evidence of failure. They’re part of the structure.

A friendship that lasts three years in a foreign place can be profound. It can hold you through transitions, reshape you, and then release you back into the wider world.

Its value isn’t diminished by its duration.

Holding people lightly — without withholding yourself

The art of saying goodbye isn’t about detachment.

It’s about learning how to hold people lightly — without armouring up.To stay present.To let relationships be meaningful without demanding permanence from them.

That’s a particular emotional skill — one expat life teaches whether you want it to or not.

What remains after people leave

Even when people go, something stays.

Ways of thinking.

Ways of coping.

A sense of being understood during a specific season of life.

Expat friendships leave imprints. They travel with you — quietly shaping who you become next.

And that, perhaps, is why we keep choosing this life.

Despite the goodbyes.

Despite the grief.

Despite the risk.

Because depth, however temporary, is still worth having. Much of this is supported by research into ambiguous loss, attachment theory, and transitory communities such as military and humanitarian postings.

Further reading if you want to dig deeper:

– Pauline Boss, Ambiguous Loss

– Susan David, Emotional Agility

– Amir Levine & Rachel Heller, Attached

– David C. Pollock & Ruth Van Reken, Third Culture Kids – Alain de Botton, essays and talks on friendship, impermanence, and emotional risk

Coming next in The Belonging Project:

Home as a Verb — what it really means to build a life when permanence is never guaranteed.