Can You Make New Friends When You Move Abroad?

Starting over in a new country can be tough, but making new friends doesn't have to be! In this latest vlog, as a retired couple living abroad on the beautiful island of Madeira, Portugal, we share our experience an tips on how to make new friends and build a social circle when you move abroad and start your 'Second Half of Life!'

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All the best!  D & M 🌎 ❤️

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Transcript

Welcome back to Track us Down! If you're just finding us, I'm Monique. And I'm Doug. Our channel is all about retiring early, moving abroad, but mostly living a "better second half of life," and making lots of friends. Hi friend. Leaving your country and moving abroad is exciting and it is amazing, but there is one big challenge and that is starting over socially. When you start over, you show up and you literally know no one. It's like being the new kid in school in a huge way, probably even in high school where it would be the absolute worst. You feel like you are disconnected and you are somewhere where you don't know anyone. So how do you start over socially and how do you make a new social group? That's what we're gonna talk about, but we're also gonna get into why we feel that making friends in your second half of life after you've done something so big as to move abroad is so rewarding and we think will be more fulfilling that you could ever have imagined. It certainly has been for us. So let's start by talking about what we left behind. Now those are big words leaving behind and we're talking about friend groups here, leaving behind friends. These are friends that you've made through your whole life, right from school, right through high school, right through university and of course through your jobs, your neighbors and so on, your social circles. These are friends that you've put a lot of time and effort into cultivating and spending time with and just feeling comfortable hanging around with. And to leave that all behind, that's pretty daunting to a lot of people. And it was for us as well. We're no different than anybody else. Now, many of those friendships are made in your twenties and your thirties if they weren't school age friends and they're based on things that maybe you did with your kids, whether they're soccer mom friends or they're hockey dad friends or neighbors, and of course colleagues, people you worked with, people that you were friends with because you saw them every single day. We definitely both had friends like that. We sure did. Just like anybody else, that is who you spend most of your time with your work colleagues. If you work in an institution or a business where you are around a lot of other people, you spend all your time with them, you become friends with them. But of course just through your kids' activities, your neighborhood activities, these are the people that you spend most of your time with and you develop these close friendships with. And also some of those friendships are very deep friendships. They can be your childhood friends from across the street that you grew up with. They can be people that you knew throughout high school that you've stayed really close to who know you, know you and you have a deep connection to them. And in your twenties and thirties as you're getting married and raising kids and you're living that first half of life, you need those really deep connections to have a sounding board or to have somebody on your side. And I think we both had that with people at work as well. You need people at your workplace that you feel connected to and then it just suddenly ends when you do something like this where you sell everything, move abroad, start a different way of life, a better second half of life, you are literally leaving that all behind. It's scary at first, but I'll tell you, it sure isn't scary going forward. It's not that bad. There's something else on the other side. So that leads us to our first point. So just bear with us here with this concept that we want to get across because we really feel strongly about this. And this is something that we've really noticed as we've talked about, whether it's childhood friends, high school friends, work friends, you do develop a certain level of deepness with them. You share things that you wouldn't share with other people and you share common experiences and you wanna fit in. It becomes sort of an echo chamber more or less. If you have close friends, you generally feel the same way about a lot of things, whether it's politics, religion, just life in general. And so there's a certain level of comfort in there because you feel that the person understands you more and you've each shared secret. So you have that deep level of comfort. And with that friendship, it's usually you have one, two, maybe three really close people, and those are the people that you do all the things that you do. You go for lunches, you go to parties, you socialize, and it's the same people on repeat. That's kind of how you have those deep friendships. You're always together. From what we've experienced here, and this is just looking back on it, of course there's a lot of great things that come along with it. When you have somebody that you can share something with and you know that you can trust them and they understand where you're coming from, that is huge. And you don't lose that deep friendship just because you've moved abroad. You can keep up that deep friendship. You are still friends, absolutely, they're still there. And when you go back and it's just like picking up right where you left off, you don't have to worry about that. But the downside to that, or a risk of that is it becomes somewhat of what we call an echo chamber where you are just saying things that are repeated back to you that everybody feels the same way. So you're not really experiencing sometimes like outside that bubble, different ideas and you're not really maybe experiencing life to the fullest. And I think that has been, for me a huge surprise here moving abroad when you have a vast number of people that you're friends with, it's not as deep as those other friendships. It's shallower, but not in a negative way. It's just across a much bigger breadth of society, a much bigger sampling of society. You are exposed to different outlooks on life, different ways of thinking, and you can sample all those and take from those what you like. I think it has made me a much more broader person as far as experiences having so many more people to draw on here in our second half of life, which it sort of supports that idea of the first half of life. Your needs are different in the first half of life. They say that people are friends for a reason or a season, and I think the reason and season in your twenties and thirties is about growing and about raising family careers. You have all that going on. All of a sudden when you move abroad or you retire or you do both like we did, you have a new opportunity here. What we're gonna talk about is how to rebuild an entire social circle. 
So as Doug mentioned earlier, in the second half of life, many friendships begin with a shared interest. And here in Madeira or Portugal or wherever you choose to live your "second half of life," when you're ready to start making new friends, really consider the activities that you wanna be doing. So instead of the depth of friendship you're looking for the breadth, breadth, breadth of friendship. People who enjoy doing the same things you do. And that can be a lot more activities because you have a lot more free time. So for us, joining things that are of interest to us either together or separately, we have made so many different friends for different activities and it has brought so much joy and so many new ideas to our lives and we hope that we've done that for the other people as well. And I think the main thing you touched on there was this breadth of experiences. And it's not just the ones that you're interested in yourself. You may not know what you're interested in until somebody that you meet says, Hey, we're doing this. And you're like, oh, that's kind of neat. I wanna try that. Whether that's board games, whether that's certain types of fitness things, whether that's certain types of games or outings, there's things I just haven't thought of before. And then we meet different people and they bring that into our life and we can sample that. We might not do it all the time, but we can take and try that. And we gain much more experience in life just from meeting these people. And you know what, it's really interesting to note that all the people we've met here, all of our friends, acquaintances, everyone reports the same thing in their second half of life here, is that they have so many more friends than they did in their first half of life, which kind of makes sense when we talk about how busy we all are in our first half of life and those deep friendships that we needed to help support us through our first half of life. Here we have all sorts of different friends, like Doug said, with different ideas, bringing different ideas, and everyone that we know has the same experience. And I think my definition of friend has changed. It used to be that version of friend that was your school, schoolhood,
is that a word? Yeah, schoolhood? schoolmate? 
school days? School days. That was your school day type of friend that knew you from growing up. To me, that was the only type of friend that I knew was shared deep experiences. And here it's different. You don't have to get that deep with anybody. I wouldn't necessarily want to get that deep with anybody. It's more about a breadth of experience, sharing new experiences, taking from them experiences that they've had incorporating into your life, what you want, what you don't want. I think it can be a lot more choosy here than you used to have to be to be part of your social circle. And you could have many social circles here. When your time is limited in your first half of life, you kind of have your social circle here, you can have a whole bunch of different social circles. And there's also sort of the vacation mode aspect going on that people are here and gone here and gone. Whether they're splitting their time between being abroad and being back home or if they travel often. And many people do travel often, so people are on island off island. So it's nice to have different groups that you kind of float in and out of. And that's different than it was in our first half of life. And that is a huge thing too, is the people that you're meeting here that are doing this kind of thing in their second half of life, whether they're retired or they're working abroad, they are on the move, they're traveling more, they're going to a lot of places. Places maybe we haven't heard of or we'd like to go back to. They share those experiences, we add 'em to our list, you know, things get moved up as far as the countries we want to go to or moved down a lot of times depending on other people's experiences as well, because it's just so intriguing and so exciting when they bring back these stories of where they've been. I think we're exposed to that a lot more, tons more. So how do you find all these social circles to join? Some of it happens totally organically where you just literally meet people doing the activities that you enjoy doing. If you're out for a hike, you meet someone, you go to play a sport, you meet someone, and sometimes you can join online groups. There's tons of groups to join, whether that be Facebook or online. And for us, we would join groups that have an interest shared so that there's that commonality. There are meetups available where people go for drinks and stuff and you can meet people that way. And of course, just a word of caution as far as joining groups and what you're doing in your retirement or your second half of life. We've all heard these stories of people who go down to places, whether it's Central America, south America or anywhere and join a retirement community and it becomes basically a day drinking community. So naturally when you do join these kind of groups, there's a natural progression where it could be around drinking and that drinking can come earlier and earlier or just more often. So if you're like us and you wanna live a long healthy second half of life, you're interested in longevity, blue zones, that sorts of things, it's always important to keep those type of things on the top of your mind as well. So you don't get drawn into that way of like meetups are great, but you don't wanna be drinking all the time. Oh, okay, enough lecturing. Let's get back to the points. Another thing that we've noticed is that here we can have quality of friendships and quantity. And that's something we didn't have in our first half of life that we can have so many more friends. And as I said earlier, it's not just us, everybody talks about having so many more friends and you feel really connected If something were to happen or you kind of need to reach out to people, there are people here to reach out to, which feels really good. Everybody's kind of looking after everybody else. If something were to happen or if you needed something or you needed help for something, there's so many people that jump in, you do make great friendships here. We certainly have. But they don't have to be those deep kind of childhood friendships that you needed when you were younger. You can just pick and choose. And on the topic of picking and choosing and talking about this vast number of people that you meet, it's also because you're meeting people of different generations, different ages. We have friends who are much older than us. We have friends who are much younger than us and we have quite a few that are around the same age as us. And that is important because the older generations bring in a different perspective and they're inspiring, they're very inspiring to know that we can maintain a certain level of health and mobility and travel and interest in the world 10, 15, 20 years from now. I just find that so inspiring and just very interesting. And on the other side, we've met so many people that are actually quite a bit younger than us, whether they're still working here or they're traveling and we've met them that way and they bring a different perspective into our lives and they share their ideas and how they view the world. And it's so much different than what our experience was. But you combine those two kinds of things of the older generations and the younger generations and all that just adds to our lives as well. It gives you really different events to attend. You can be going to a 75th birthday party one day and to a couple getting married in their twenties the next day. It's just such a huge breath, breadth, breadth
of experience that we get to have rather than typically back in our first half of life. Our friends were our age going through the exact same thing and that all makes sense for that. But here it's an opportunity to have so much more and really, isn't that what it's supposed to be all about? Debate, different perspectives, taking other people's opinions. Maybe they differ from yours discussing it or just thinking about later after you've been out with somebody and thinking about what they said and going, oh, actually that kind of makes sense. I see where they're coming from. I shouldn't be so hard line on what I'm thinking about this because there are different views out there that is what we think is a huge benefit of having such a huge breadth of people to choose from. As far as a friend pool, it is completely different than what we're used to in our first half of life, but we have found it so rewarding and we say shallow is the new...
No, Doug! 
And we say that shallow is a good thing. It's not you being shallow as a person, it just means a larger shallower friend pool, right? You don't have to have that deep, deep connection to count someone's as a friend. You don't need to share your entire life story to count someone's friend. There's other ways of having friendship and I think that's what we've discovered. So what do you think? Leave us a comment down below in a common section. We'd love to hear your perspective on this. Is this controversial? Are we being shallow? We're not giving up all the friendships that we've made in our first half of life. We are just picking from a much larger pool. And we encourage you to experience it yourself because we have more friends than we've ever had and really enjoyable experience because of that breadth, that huge pool of friends to choose from. Now, making friends of course takes effort. You have to be willing. You have to say yes to invites and you have to invite and return, you have to join things, you have to make an effort. But it is all done with pleasure and joy. It is so much fun in your second half in life to connect with new people and new ideas. And we are loving our new friends on this beautiful island of Madeira. Yes, we were starting over and yes, we had no friends when we got here, but years later that is certainly not the case. And we have friends here on the island and over the last few years living here, that friendship group, a huge friendship group, has spread out to many other countries in the world as well, which is great. We have places to go and people to visit. So we hope that if you're considering moving abroad or you have moved abroad, we'd love to hear your experience. But if you're considering it, don't worry about the friend situation. You've got it.
Thank you so much for spending some of your time with us here today. We really enjoy these conversations. If you enjoy a good conversation about retiring early or just living a better second half of life, whether where you are or abroad, please remember to like our video, subscribe to our channel and give us a thumbs up. We really appreciate your feedback, friend.
Thank you so much for spending some of your time with us today. And as always, check back in and, Track Us Down!