Every piece of advice about adult friendship reduces to the same instruction: find something local that repeats weekly and keep going. That instruction assumes you live where you sleep. If you are working away for a few weeks or a few months, at a client site with a hotel room at the end of the day, the local thing is temporary by definition and the people who already know you are a train ride and a Friday away.
This is a narrower problem than it first looks, and worth separating from constant travel. You are not in a different city every fortnight. You are in one city, for a stretch, and the days are completely solved: there is a project, an office, people to talk to until half past six. It is the run of empty evenings that is the problem, and what to do about them changes between week one, week four, and the weekend you decide not to fly home.
01Why the usual advice fails
Weekly attendance works because it produces repeated contact with the same faces. A long stay away breaks that at both ends. In the city you are working in, the assignment usually finishes before the fourth or fifth visit that turns you from a new arrival into a familiar one, so the mechanism that normally does the work never gets the time it needs. At home, you miss enough that people stop building plans that include you. The second one does more damage than the first, and it happens quietly.
There is a version of this that is worth naming: a few months in, you stop being invited at home, not out of any coldness, but because everyone has learned that you are probably away. Getting back into the rotation takes deliberate effort, because nobody is going to test the assumption on your behalf.
02What works when you are only here for a while
The trick is to pick formats defined by the activity rather than the group, so you can walk into one on a Tuesday in week two without an introduction and without a backstory.
Things you can join cold, any week. Free timed runs on a Saturday morning, climbing walls, board game evenings, language exchange tables, drop-in classes, pick-up sport. The common feature is that someone arriving alone is the expected case rather than an event.
Things with a task in the middle. When there is an activity, nobody has to conduct an interview about who you are and how long you are here for, which is the conversation that makes working away socially tiring.
The same format on every assignment. If you do the Tuesday board game night wherever you are posted, the format itself becomes familiar even when the people are not, and walking in cold gets substantially easier.
Asynchronous contact as the backbone. Voice notes and a couple of live group chats carry a friendship at home across two months away far better than an intention to catch up properly, which never survives a project schedule.
03The evening after work
The default is to eat in the room and answer email, and the default is what produces the problem. One rule covers most of it: leave the building. Even without company, an hour in a public place where other people are present is a materially different evening from an hour alone with a laptop and the television on for noise, and it keeps you in the habit of being out, which is the thing that erodes first.
If you want the stronger version, put the thing you intend to do in the first week rather than the last. Left to the end of an assignment, it gets cancelled by tiredness every time, and then you fly home having done none of it.
04A long stay in London specifically
London is where most of these assignments land, and it is a strange city to be temporary in. Everything is available and almost none of it is aimed at you. The listings are written for people who live here, the clubs assume you will still be around in March, and the two bits of the map you actually know are the streets around the client's office and the streets around the hotel.
A few things are true of a stay measured in weeks rather than years.
Your radius is smaller than the map suggests. After a ten-hour day you will walk fifteen minutes or take one stop on the tube. Anything that means crossing London at seven o'clock happens once and never again. Work out what is genuinely reachable from the hotel and treat that as the city for now.
Monday to Thursday is the real week. If you fly home on a Thursday night, every recurring thing that meets at the weekend is closed to you before you start. Look at what runs on weeknights and ignore the rest.
Booking beats browsing. Deciding at half past six what to do at eight is how the evening ends up being spent in the room. Something with a time and a place already attached, put in the diary on a Sunday, survives the day that overruns.
Pick the thing you would do at home. Five-a-side, a quiz, a bouldering wall, a run club. The point is not to see London, it is to be somewhere with other people doing something. Sightseeing on your own in the dark after work is a different activity and it does not scratch the same itch.
Say what you are. Being here on a project until November is a completely ordinary thing to be in London, and it opens a conversation better than pretending to live here. Plenty of people in the room have done a stint somewhere themselves.
The evening most people default to is the hotel restaurant: a starter and a main eaten quickly, back upstairs by nine. That is fine twice. By the eleventh night it is the thing you are trying to get away from. Eating alone every night on a work trip deals with the meals, and the evenings on a London business trip covers the weeknights in more detail.
05One home city that still knows you
Everything above gives you company on a weeknight. None of it gives you people who know your history, and that is what a run of long assignments actually runs short of. So treat the city you go back to differently from the one you are working in.
Hold exactly one fixed commitment there. Not four, one. Something that meets on a fixed day and that you attend every time you are in town, without negotiating with yourself. Attending a third of the sessions of one thing beats attending a tenth of three things, because you stay a recognised face.
Be the one who fixes the date. When you travel, you have the schedule constraints, so you should be doing the proposing. Waiting to be invited puts your social life in the hands of people who have already learned you are usually away.
Publish your pattern. Tell the people who matter which weeks you are around. It sounds officious and it works, because it lets other people plan around you instead of guessing.
Use the home weekends properly. One evening booked in advance for the same people beats a free weekend that stays open and gets spent on laundry.
Say yes to the thing you will be back for. Committing to something six weeks out that requires you to be in town is one of the few forces that will shape a travel schedule you otherwise treat as fixed.
06The part that is worth being honest about
A long assignment produces a fair number of good evenings with people you will never see again, and it is easy to mistake the volume of those for a social life. They are worth having and they do not accumulate. Relationships with history in them come from the one commitment you hold at home and from a small number of people you keep contacting while you are away, and both of those require doing something specific on the weekends you are back rather than resting.
That still leaves the weeknights in the city you are working in, and those want the opposite thing: no history required, no build-up, just a table with people already at it on a Wednesday. That is what a table in London is for. You book one seat for £15, the restaurant is confirmed 72 hours before, and you turn up to six to eight people who all made the same decision and paid the same fee to be there. Food and drinks you settle at the restaurant. It is one decision made on a Sunday instead of a fortnight spent trying to arrange something in a city where the only two people you know are colleagues.
Related Questions
How do you make friends when you are working away for a few months?
Split it in two. In the city you are working in, use formats you can join cold on a weeknight, such as drop-in classes, climbing walls, board game nights, run clubs and booked group dinners, because the assignment will end before you become a familiar face anywhere. Then hold a single fixed commitment in the city you go home to, so some people still know your history.
Why does normal friendship advice not work on a long work trip?
Because it depends on weekly attendance producing repeated contact with the same faces. A long stay away breaks that at both ends: the project finishes before the fourth or fifth visit that makes you a familiar face, and at home people stop including you in plans because they have learned you are probably away. The second effect is the more damaging one and it happens quietly.
What is there to do in London after work when you are here on a project?
Work with a small radius, because after a ten-hour day you will not cross London at seven o'clock. Look for weeknight formats rather than weekend ones if you fly home on a Thursday, and put something in the diary on a Sunday so the day that overruns does not decide the evening for you. A booked table in London is one seat for £15, with the restaurant confirmed 72 hours before.
How do I stop being forgotten at home while I am away?
Do the proposing yourself, since you are the one with the schedule constraints, and tell people which weeks you are actually around so they can plan around you rather than guess. Hold one fixed commitment in your home city and attend it every time you are back, and book at least one evening in advance on the weekends you are there.
KF.Social
