Making friends in Denmark: why it is hard and what helps

Why does everything here stop at friendly?

Most of the friendship around you finished being built before you arrived.

School, gymnasium, the handball club at 12, the shared flat at 22. By the time people are in their 30s the circle is largely complete and nobody in it is recruiting. What you are meeting is not a closed door so much as an absence of any vacancy, which is harder to argue with and much harder to take personally in a useful way.

The shape of it is recognisable. A long, genuinely good conversation at somebody’s birthday, warm on both sides, ending with something that sounds like a plan. Then nothing. You check your phone more often than you would admit for about 4 days, and then you stop checking and quietly file the evening as a failure, which it was not.

Why does trying harder make it worse?

Wanting it this much is visible, and it changes what you are offering.

You prepare a little. You are slightly more agreeable than you would be at home, you laugh a beat early, you are careful not to take up room. What the other person receives, without necessarily thinking it through, is a request rather than an offer, and a request from a stranger is tiring even when they like you.

This is the uncomfortable centre of it. The posture that works here is something close to not minding how it goes, and not minding is precisely what is unavailable to a person who has been alone since February. I will not pretend that tension resolves neatly. What usually helps is not performing indifference but taking enough weight off any single evening that it stops being an audition.

Does being in the same room really do the work?

More of it than anything clever you might say.

A randomised experiment in 182 classrooms across 40 schools seated roughly 3,000 pupils next to each other at random for a semester. Sitting beside someone raised the chance of a mutual friendship from about 15 per cent to about 22 per cent.¹ The study was done with children in a rural part of Hungary and the authors say it may not transfer to other settings, and its design cannot tell whether proximity created new friendships or stopped existing ones from fading.

Take the shape rather than the number. The thing that moved the result was not charm or similarity, it was repeated presence that neither person had to arrange. Adult life in Denmark supplies very little of that to a foreigner by accident, which means you have to buy it deliberately.

So why is turning up still not enough?

Because the other person is doing half of this, and their half is not yours to manage.

A survey of 469 students in the host country, all of whom had already had contact with international students, found that contact on its own did not predict willingness to form a friendship. It was linked to friendship only through the students’ own attitudes and their confidence in communicating across cultures.² That was a cross-sectional, self-reported study in China rather than Denmark, so it cannot establish cause and does not describe Danes.

What it describes is a division of labour that most lonely people refuse to accept. Whether somebody steps towards you depends partly on their week, their confidence in English, their own capacity for anyone new. Holding that is a relief on the days you can manage it and an irritation on the days you cannot, because it takes the outcome out of your hands at the same time as it takes the blame.

What helps, and what to do when it does not

Build the week first and let the friendships arrive out of it. Almost every person I have seen get somewhere with this changed their structure rather than their personality.

• Fix 2 things you would attend anyway. A choir, a class, a workshop, a volunteer rota. Among immigrants surveyed in northern Spain, taking part in leisure activities went together with stronger social networks and a greater sense of inclusion, although that study was cross-sectional with a convenience sample and cannot show which way the effect runs.³ Choose on the activity, not on who might be there.
• Let repetition do the persuading. The most useful thing you can become is familiar. Familiarity lowers what approaching you costs someone, and nothing you say achieves that as reliably as turning up for the eighth time.
• Drop the audition. Being a little less charming and a little more ordinary makes you considerably easier to approach. Mild and unremarkable is a social asset here in a way it may not have been where you grew up.
• Let the first year run unequal. You will propose more than you are invited, probably for a long while. That says more about who has a free evening than about how much anyone wants you there.
• Keep the counting honest. Having 3 invitations go nowhere is a very small sample. It feels like a conclusion because of how much was riding on each one.

There is a point where none of this is the right instrument. If approaching people has become frightening rather than merely tiring, if the loneliness has settled into your sleep and your work, or if you were socially easy everywhere else and have become someone you do not recognise here, then more events will not fix it and failing at them will reinforce the wrong idea. Sitting down with someone and looking at what happens in you at the moment of making an approach is usually more productive, and that is the work I do with internationals in Copenhagen.

Questions people ask

Can therapy really help with something this practical?

Yes, because the practical part is rarely where people are stuck. Most know what to do and something stops them at the moment of doing it, and that moment is workable.

Is this social anxiety or is it just Denmark?

Often it starts as Denmark and becomes something more like anxiety. Telling the 2 apart matters, because the first calls for a change of setting and the second calls for a closer look at what you expect to happen.

How long does this kind of work take?

I will not give you a number, because it depends on what is underneath it. What I can say is that the first useful shift is usually in how you read a flat response, and that tends to come before anything changes socially.

I am an introvert. Will you try to make me sociable?

No, and attempting it would be the wrong aim. The question is whether your way of being with people is working for you here, not whether it matches someone else’s.

My partner has the Danish network. Should I come on my own?

Come alone first. When one of you is already inside a social world and the other is not, the subject turns quickly into a disagreement about effort, and your part of it is easier to see without that in the room.

If friendships here are slow to come, therapy for loneliness is where I help you keep going without losing heart.

Sources

1. Rohrer, J.M., Keller, T. and Elwert, F. (2021). Proximity can induce diverse friendships: a large randomized classroom experiment. PLOS ONE, 16(8), e0255097.
2. Tang, L. and Zhang, C. (2023). Intercultural friendships with international students in China. Behavioral Sciences, 13(10), 855.
3. Berasategi Sancho, N., Roman Etxebarrieta, G., Alonso Saez, I. et al. (2023). Leisure as a space for inclusion and the improvement of life satisfaction of immigrants. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 24, 425 to 439.

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.