It was a question raised once again over a recent dinner party table, populated largely, though not entirely, by internationals. The woman seated next to the evening’s resident columnist bemoaned the cultural barrier with a familiar exhaustion, declaring simply that breaking into local social circles feels like scaling an impossible wall. Adding an unexpected twist to the grievance, a Dutch woman seated directly across the table chimed in with fierce agreement. Having recently relocated to The Hague after spending the past few years living in Groningen, she was apparently struggling just as much to meet people and build a local network.
This shared struggle is hardly unique. It is an oft-heard complaint within international circles across the country, where organizations catering to foreign professionals and students regularly publish survival guides detailing how to achieve what feels like a monumental feat. The Leiden International Center, for instance, offers patient explanations to bewildered newcomers, noting that many locals maintain deeply rooted social circles that they have carefully cultivated and preserved since childhood. Meanwhile, the city of Amsterdam sets the bar reassuringly low in its official guidance on socializing the Dutch way. It points out that a neighbor does not necessarily have to become a lifelong friend—though they certainly might—and suggests that merely being on nodding terms with the people living around you can go a long way toward helping you feel at home in your new surroundings.
The digital landscape tells the exact same story. A simple scroll through dozens of threads on Reddit reveals a constant stream of lamentations from recently relocated individuals who are actively struggling to find genuine human connections amongst the local population. True to form, the responses from Dutch posters on these forums can be bracingly blunt. One local user famously replied to a struggling newcomer with a characteristically unfiltered assessment: "We don’t know you, you might just be unlikable for all we know."
While such a response might sound harsh to foreign ears, a more culturally attuned interpretation reveals it to be merely direct—and, in all probability, entirely accurate.
To be fair, you are likely not unlikable in a broad, existential sense. You are probably a perfectly pleasant person who possesses a rich history of friendships and loved ones back home who simply happen to live thousands of kilometers away. But to the average local—let us call them Tina, Henk, and Luca—you currently represent an unknown variable, and frankly, you just do not bring much immediate utility or shared history to the table.
To understand this dynamic properly, one must first dismantle the popular international myth that Dutch people establish their entire social roster before they even evacuate the womb. It is certainly true, based on plenty of anecdotal and observable experience, that Dutch people fiercely maintain the friendships they forged back in childhood and during their university years. However, this phenomenon is not uniquely Dutch; it is true of literally everyone across nearly every culture on the planet. One must concede, of course, that the Netherlands is a remarkably small and densely populated country, a geographic reality that undeniably makes it much easier to keep up with old friends who live just a short train or bicycle ride away.
In reality, the vast majority of human beings across all nationalities make their core group of friends prior to their early twenties. You simply chose to pack up your life, leave your established social safety net behind for a land of clogs and tulips, and start entirely from scratch. Now, your personal lineup is completely empty, and you find yourself clawing desperately for a position on a team where there are very few openings left.
This fundamental reality leads directly to a broader truth about human socialization: there is a very good reason why most of us make our closest friends early in life. It is significantly easier to make friends prior to reaching the crushing responsibilities of adulthood. The solid foundations of primary school friendships are usually built on remarkably simple premises—namely, that another child was randomly selected by a teacher to sit next to you, or that they happened to want to play the exact same imaginary game at recess. You go to school all day long, you see these exact same people day in and day out under low-stakes conditions, and you have not yet been weighed down or downtrodden by the daily stresses of adult life.
Fast forward to the present day, and the equation changes entirely. Now you need to find a vastly deeper level of connection than simply mutually agreeing that you like playing together in the sandbox. More importantly, you need to find the actual time required to foster and maintain that connection somewhere in between holding down a demanding job, exercising, raising children, spending quality time with a partner, and remembering basic household administration tasks—such as finally ordering a replacement shower curtain.
Even the aforementioned Dutch woman at the recent dinner party, despite speaking the native language and understanding the local culture by birth, was actively struggling to rebuild her social life after moving cities. This proves that the isolation felt by newcomers is not simply a byproduct of being a foreigner; rather, it is a universal symptom of how difficult it is to make new friends post-graduation, regardless of your passport.
It would be naive, however, to pretend that being an international does not add a severe layer of complication to the process. While it is true that Dutch people speak English at an exceptionally high, fluent level, that convenience does not mean they genuinely want to speak their second language all the time in their private, relaxed downtime. The language barrier invariably makes it harder for a newcomer to mesh smoothly into an established group dynamic. If you do manage to make a Dutch friend and they graciously invite you to their intimate birthday party or a casual home gathering, your presence suddenly forces every single person in that social circle to consciously switch from their native Dutch to English.
Furthermore, you do not share the exact same cultural references, the same nuanced local jokes, or the same foundational, subconscious understanding of the world around you. None of these hurdles are entirely insurmountable, but when compounded together, they make forming a deep and lasting bond substantially more difficult.
Those who came looking for a neat, foolproof instruction manual or a set of clever life hacks on how to easily penetrate Dutch social circles will inevitably find themselves disappointed. This is not a formal advice column, and making genuine friends as an adult is a notoriously challenging endeavor under the best of circumstances. When you attempt to do it across distinct cultural and language differences, you are essentially playing the social game on hard mode.
In the meantime, newcomers would do well to manage their expectations and perhaps try a simpler approach: start by just nodding at people on the street or in the hallway. Eventually, you might just cross paths with someone who recently moved from Groningen and is also desperately trying to convince everyone around them that they are, in fact, entirely likable.
