Field guide · The move

How to Make Friends in a New City

Friendship runs on hours, not chemistry — and that single fact explains almost everything that goes wrong after a move. Here is the arithmetic, and how to beat it.

The SeaWingman Team · Updated September 9, 2026 · 9 min read

The problem is arithmetic, not personality

Almost everyone who moves somewhere new arrives with the same private worry: that they have got worse at this. That they were fine at making friends at twenty-two and something has since gone wrong with them personally.

Almost nobody has got worse at it. What changed is the supply of hours.

Jeffrey Hall, a communication studies researcher at the University of Kansas, put numbers on it in a study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Across two samples — one of them 355 adults who had moved to a new city within the previous six months, which is to say people in exactly your position — he arrived at a working set of thresholds.

Those three numbers deserve a caveat, because they are quoted everywhere without one. They are Hall’s own summary across both studies, not the raw output of either: his statistical cut-points came out considerably higher for the adults and lower for the students, and he rounds toward the middle when stating the general case. He is also candid that the estimates run high, because people kept accumulating hours after a friendship had already tipped over, and that only friendships which survived were measured — the ones that quietly died are missing from the arithmetic entirely.

So treat them as magnitudes rather than laws. What matters is the order of magnitude: tens of hours for an acquaintance to warm up, something like a hundred for a friend. Hall is careful about the rest: “You can’t make people spend time with you, but you can invite them.”

But even as rough magnitudes they are clarifying. Ninety hours is not a personality problem. It is a scheduling problem. And it explains the thing that confuses people most about moving somewhere new: why you can meet dozens of perfectly nice people in your first month and still, in month three, have nobody to call on a Sunday.

You met thirty people once. You needed to meet three people thirty times.

One more finding from the same paper is worth more than the headline numbers, and almost nobody quotes it: not all hours count. Hall found that the proportion of time two people spent working or in class together negativelypredicted closeness, while time spent hanging out — unstructured, chosen, no agenda — predicted it positively. He calls workplaces and classrooms “closed systems”: you are there for another reason, and the hours mostly do not convert.

Which is the quiet explanation for a very common complaint. You can spend forty hours a week around colleagues and still have nobody to call on a Sunday, and that is not a failure of effort. It is the wrong kind of hour. The same study found something similar about conversation: more small talk predicted less closeness over time, while catching up, joking around and actually saying something predicted more.

Why proximity beats shared interests

Once you accept the arithmetic, a lot of standard advice inverts. “Find people who share your interests” is the most common thing anyone will tell you, and it is not wrong so much as second-order. Shared interests decide whether you enjoy the hours. Proximity decides whether the hours happen at all.

Here is the pattern, and it is remarkably consistent across cities. You meet someone you genuinely click with. They live forty minutes away. You exchange numbers and you both mean it. Three weeks later the plan you are trying to make requires an hour and a half of travel on a weeknight. One of you reschedules, politely. Then it quietly stops. Nobody did anything wrong, and no hours were accumulated.

Meanwhile the person in your building whose taste in films you find baffling has, without either of you deciding anything, accumulated forty hours with you this year.

There is a neat experiment behind this. Psychologists Back, Schmukle and Egloff randomly assigned seats to 54 first-year students at a single introductory session — one meeting — and found that who happened to sit next to whom still predicted how close those students were a year later. It is a small sample and one cohort, so do not read it as destiny. But it is a clean demonstration of an uncomfortable point: arbitrary physical proximity shapes friendship well beyond the moment it happens, because it quietly decides who accumulates hours with whom.

So the rule of thumb worth adopting is a radius rather than a category: choose recurring activities within about thirty minutes of where you sleep. Not because near things are better, but because near things are the ones you will still attend when it is raining, when you are tired, and when you have had a bad week — which is precisely when the hours are hardest to buy and most worth having.

In a city like Bangkok, which ranks year after year among the world’s most congested in TomTom’s traffic index, this stops being a rule of thumb and becomes the whole game. We wrote about that in detail in our Bangkok field guide.

Weeks three to six, and why they feel like that

Almost nobody warns people about this part, so it arrives as evidence of personal failure rather than as a scheduled event.

The first fortnight after a move is usually fine. There is a flat to sort out, a phone plan, a bank account, a neighbourhood to walk around. It is busy and novel and the busyness does a good impression of a life. Then the admin finishes. The novelty thins. And you are left with an evening, a phone with nobody local in it, and the dawning arithmetic that the friendships you started three weeks ago have accumulated perhaps six hours each.

That trough is not a sign the move was wrong. It is the completely predictable gap between when the distractions run out and when the hours have had time to add up. Knowing it is coming is genuinely most of the defence — people who expect it treat it as a phase, and people who do not tend to conclude something much darker about themselves or the city.

It is also worth taking seriously rather than shrugging off. The US Surgeon General’s advisory on social connection gathers the evidence that sustained loneliness carries real physical health consequences, drawing on work including Holt-Lunstad’s meta-analysis of social relationships and mortality risk. A month of it after a move is ordinary. A year of it is not, and is worth treating as a problem to solve rather than a mood to wait out.

Five things that actually accumulate hours

All of these are variations on one idea: put yourself somewhere the same people will be, repeatedly, without anyone having to organise it each time.

When the new city is in another country

Everything above still applies, and two things change.

The first is turnover. In expat-heavy cities a real share of the people you meet will leave within a year or two, which means the hours you invest are more likely to end in an airport than in a falling-out. This is genuinely harder, and the honest adaptation is not to invest less but to start more threads in parallel — and to weight your effort slightly toward people with roots in the place, who are not on a countdown.

The second is that the usual on-ramps are missing. You have no colleagues from before, no university friends nearby, no cousin who knows someone. Every hour has to be built from scratch, which is why the recurring-activity habit matters more abroad than it does at home, not less. InterNations’ annual Expat Insider survey has found for years that settling in socially is one of the hardest parts of moving abroad, and it is consistently rated worse than the practical logistics people worry about beforehand.

This is roughly why we built SeaWingman. It is a friendship app for expats, nomads and travellers in Southeast Asia — not a dating app with a friends mode bolted on — and its job is the unglamorous first step of the arithmetic: finding the two or three people near you who are also looking, so that the hours have somewhere to start. It does not replace showing up repeatedly. Nothing does.

If you are heading to Thailand specifically, our first-90-days guide walks through the same timeline with the local specifics attached, and this comparison covers which apps actually have anyone on them there.

Questions people ask