Why expats struggle making friends in Germany
You have the job. You have the apartment. You have found the supermarket and figured out the U-Bahn. And yet, three months in, your social life consists almost entirely of colleagues and the occasional video call home.
This is not a personal failure. It is one of the most consistently reported experiences of expat life in German cities, and it has structural causes that go well beyond shyness or a lack of effort. Understanding those causes is the first step toward doing something about them.
The difficulty is not unique to Germany, but a few things make it particularly pronounced here.
Germans tend to have well-established, long-standing social networks built over years of school, university, and neighbourhood life. Breaking into those networks as an outsider, in a second language, without shared history, is harder than it looks from the outside. This is not unfriendliness. It is social density. The circles are already full.
Research across Scandinavian cities, which share many of the same cultural dynamics as Germany's major urban centres, points to the same pattern. A large survey of expats in Copenhagen found that difficulty making local friends was the third most common reason internationally mobile professionals considered cutting their stay short. More than half of all respondents said that more organised social events would have helped them settle in. Not language classes, not apps, but structured opportunities to meet people in person.
The challenge compounds in the early weeks because of timing. You arrive without a social context. The colleagues you meet at work have existing lives outside the office. Your neighbourhood is full of people who already know each other. The natural social infrastructure that most people build over years simply does not exist yet, and there is no obvious way to bootstrap it quickly.
The standard advice for making friends as an expat runs something like this: join a club, take a German class, find expat meetups, use apps. All of that is true, and none of it is particularly wrong. But it misses the structural issue, which is that all of those approaches require you to first solve a more fundamental problem: where do you actually live, and what kind of social environment does that create?
Someone renting a standard flat in Berlin, Hamburg, or Munich arrives in a sealed unit. They have four walls and a front door that closes. Their neighbours are strangers who have no particular reason to interact. Even in shared flats, the social dynamic is often transactional. People share a kitchen but lead entirely separate lives. The housing itself is socially inert.
This is not a small thing. The single fastest predictor of whether an expat builds a social network quickly is whether their living situation creates regular, low-pressure contact with other people. Not networking events. Not apps. Contact.
The expats who settle in most successfully tend to share a few things in common.
The first is that they create or find structured social entry points early, not after they have been isolated for three months, but in the first two weeks. The welcome dinner, the neighbours who introduce themselves, the shared activity that does not require you to already have things in common with people. Starting a conversation is much easier when there is something shared to talk about.
The second is that they invest in the expat community first, not as a consolation prize, but as a genuine foundation. Research consistently shows that expats find it significantly easier to connect with other internationals than with locals in the early months. This is not a failure of integration. It is a realistic reading of how social networks form. The international community becomes the base from which local connections eventually branch.
The third is physical proximity. People who live near others in similar situations, who encounter the same faces regularly in low-stakes settings, build friendships faster than people who meet sporadically at organised events. Frequency matters more than intensity. A shared kitchen produces more friendships than a monthly networking evening.
This is where the housing choice becomes a social decision, not just a logistical one.
A standard flat, however well-located, does not provide social infrastructure. Serviced apartments and short-term rentals are even more isolated. They optimise for comfort and convenience, not for the casual repeated contact that builds friendships.
Coliving is different because it puts you in regular proximity with people who are, like you, internationally mobile, new to the city, and looking to build a life there. That structural proximity is where most coliving friendships actually start, before any event or organised activity, simply because you share a kitchen with compatible people every morning.
If you want to understand what that looks like in practice at LifeX, the detail is in our piece on how LifeX builds community across its cities.
Even in the most social environment, making real friends takes time. The research is consistent on this: it typically takes months of repeated contact before acquaintances become genuine friendships. Anyone who moves to Berlin in January and expects a close social circle by March is setting themselves up for disappointment.
What changes with the right environment is not the timeline of deep friendship. It is the timeline of not feeling completely alone. Having people around you who are friendly, interested, and in a similar situation is not the same as having close friends. But it is a long way from the sealed flat and the quiet evenings that characterise the worst versions of expat loneliness.
If you are moving to Berlin, Hamburg, or Munich and you are thinking about the social side of the transition, it is worth asking one question of your housing choice before you commit: does this apartment put me in regular contact with other people, or does it seal me away from them?
The administrative and financial arguments for coliving are well documented elsewhere. Renting in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich is harder than most people expect, and the all-inclusive model removes a significant amount of friction. But the social argument is at least as strong, and it is the one that tends to matter most six months in.
If you are ready to see what is available, you can browse rooms in Berlin, Hamburg, or Munich directly.
The social life you are hoping for does not build itself. But the right environment gives it a much better chance.
