The Expat Exit: When Friends Move Home

The flip side of making friends as an expat is knowing that there’s a really high chance your friends will leave.

Last week, my good friend AC left Paris to move back to the US. As I told her, two things can be true: I’m thrilled for her and I’m sad for myself. This is my first friend to leave Paris, and it’s made me think a lot about how the “expat exit” is a standard experience for everyone who lives abroad.

She and I share a lot of mutual friends in Paris, so I’m watching them go through the experience as well. I had lunch with a shared friend this week, and she’s turning her sadness into motivation to deepen existing friendships and make new ones. I love how she’s taking a sad event and using it to build a bigger, deeper community for herself.

Coffee at AC’s before her move, and the day we forgot what to do with our hands.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I encountered a completely different view on expat friendships when we were getting ready to move to London. An older acquaintance who had lived in London a decade earlier told us that Londoners aren’t always open to making friends with expats. Expats come in hot, stay for 2-3 years, and then inevitably leave, so his experience was Londoners didn’t even want to bother.

At the time, this advice felt harsh and excessive. For one thing, who wouldn’t want to be friends with us? And secondly, we hadn’t even left Austin yet, so we didn’t exactly have plans to leave London.

Now that we’ve lived abroad for 8 years and we’re on our third city, I understand the basis of his argument. But I’ve been on both sides of the expat exit multiple times now, and I completely disagree with his conclusion. Yes, expats move away. But I’d rather meet interesting people and have a robust community while I can versus closing myself off just because someone might leave.

In fact, I still lived in the US the first time I experienced friends leaving the city. When I graduated business school, I decided to stay in Austin while most of my friends moved away. It sucked. But once I got over being sad, I reframed it and realized that now I’d have a friend in almost every major city in the US. Add in friends from growing up, college, Capon Springs, and that network got even bigger. Almost any time I travelled for work, I had a friend to visit. When I was stranded in Norfolk after a computer outage grounded all flights, all it took was one text and a 20 minute Uber, and I was at Dustin & Lauren’s with a glass of wine and a place to stay.

So now as an expat, that network just goes global. It’s not the same as being able to pop down to grab coffee at Back in Black and wander around Place des Voges with AC, but now I’ve got one more good friend back on the East Coast.

We miss you,

AC

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