If you moved here recently and it is not going the way you expected, there is a number that will probably help more than any amount of encouragement.
01The first year is different, and it is measurable
Analysis of the Survey of Londoners looked at severe loneliness by how long people had lived here. Under one year came out significantly associated with severe loneliness. One to two years, two to three, three to five, five to ten: none of them were statistically significant. For young Londoners the effect in that first year was even stronger.
Read that properly and it is good news. This is not a slow slide that gets worse. It is a specific, bounded, extremely common phase that most people come out of the other side of, and knowing that it has an end changes how it feels to be in it.
02Why the first year is the hard one
Everything that would normally build a social life is missing at once. You have no shared history with anyone. Your colleagues have existing friends. You do not yet know which pub is your pub. And crucially you have not been anywhere enough times to have become a familiar face, which is the actual mechanism by which strangers turn into people you know.
There is also the London specific problem of distance. Someone you get on with who lives an hour away will become an acquaintance you see twice a year, not a friend. The single highest leverage decision you make is where you spend your time, not who you meet.
03Six things that shorten it
- Pick a local thing that repeats weekly. Within walking distance or one short bus. Anything: a run, a walk, a class, a choir, a five a side. The requirement is not that you love it, it is that the same people are there next week.
- Go four times before you decide. The first visit tells you nothing except that you were nervous. By the fourth you are recognised, which is the whole game.
- Become a regular somewhere. The same cafe on the same morning. It sounds trivial and it is one of the most reliable ways to stop feeling like a stranger in your own area.
- Say yes to things you would normally decline, for the first six months only. This is a temporary policy, not a personality change, and you can go back to declining once you have a base.
- Find people who also arrived recently. They are the ones with capacity. Someone who has been here fifteen years has a full life and no room in it, and that is not a reflection on you.
- Take the second thing seriously. Meeting someone is not the achievement. Seeing them again is. Somebody has to suggest it and everyone is waiting for someone else to.
04Two things that will not help
Waiting to feel ready. The nerves do not resolve before you go, they resolve by going. Over half of people say anxiety about a first event stops them attending, which means the room you are nervous about is full of people who were also nervous.
Big one-off events. A launch party, a huge meetup, a festival. Excellent evenings and almost useless for friendship, because you will not see any of those people again.
05If you are here for a year or two and then leaving
People often hold back on this basis and it is worth naming, because a lot of Londoners quietly do the same calculation. Two things are true: it is a real and reasonable concern, and it is also the reason a lot of good people here are unattached and available. A friendship that lasts eighteen months and is genuinely good is not a failed friendship.
KF.Social
