Long-Distance Friendship

A familiar scene often plays out on a screen these days: a birthday party with a cup of coffee in one hand and a slice of cake on a plate, but all via a laptop sitting on the kitchen table, enabling a video call with friends in another part of the world. Laughter arrives with a slight delay. A child grows up between visits. Someone asks: ‘When are you coming back?” The answer is often vague, as planning is complicated for expats.

The recent broadcast KRO-NCRV documentary ‘Anne is searching for friends” (in Dutch) (New window) shows that friendships change as we get older. They are less of a given, less frequent, but not necessarily any less important. Time, work and family get in the way. If, moreover, you’re living abroad, in different time zones and far away, you might ask yourself: ‘What happens to relationships without physical proximity?”

Friendship – An Analysis

Friendship has a tangible component. Friendship grows through shared activities: having a coffee together, bumping into each other by chance, and being in the same places. Much of what keeps a relationship alive happens unnoticed in small, recurring moments.

If you are an expat living outside Europe, you lose this natural proximity and replace it by deliberate planning. You no longer meet up ‘just for a quick chat’ or ‘pop round for a bit’. You organise and work based on time zones and diaries. Contact is no longer spontaneous, but still heartfelt. What’s more, some friendships deepen in the distance. The fewer times you see each other, the more the bonds formed by shared experiences enhance each other. Conversations get straight to the point. Stable relationships that withstand the distance will remain. Others are lost. Friendships once taken for granted sometimes end without a word – not because of conflicts, but because of too much silence. Life moves in different directions without a natural point of intersection.

What does it mean to ‘be there’?

We live in a world where communication is possible at any time. You are always present in a way. You can make (video) calls or send messages at any time. But what does it mean to be there for someone without being physically present?

Presence no longer means sharing the same space for many expats. It’s rather about attention: a message at just the right moment, a phone call that lasts longer than planned, an unexpected gesture from the distance.

Yet, not everything can be replaced. Physical presence, a common context, even shared silence. These elements cannot be digitised. Technology bridges the distance, but the feeling of physical absence remains.

New Networks, a Different Kind of Closeness

At the same time, new relationships develop in the places where one lives with other expats, international colleagues, and neighbours whose way of life follows the same pattern of mobility. These networks have their dynamics. People often bond rapidly, as everyone knows that the time spent together can quickly be over. Yet these connections are more fragile, as the prospect of departure is always hanging in the air.

A multilayered web of relationships emerges: old friendships enduring despite the distance, family ties that are reorganised around visits, and new relationships tailored to life in the local community. None of these levels replaces the others; they all exist side by side.

Distance acts as a filter. Some relationships dissolve, others endure, but not necessarily for reasons one might expect beforehand. Friendship is less a question of a shared past than a question of constant adjustment. We hear in the documentary: Friendship turns out to be more of a choice. A choice to opt for it time and again, even when it would be easier not to, given the distance.