Is it hard to make friends with the Dutch or is it you?

Our regular columnist wants to know whether the Dutch are really so hard to make friends with – or is the problem you?

“It’s just so hard to make friends with the Dutch,” the woman seated next to me bemoans. I’m at a dinner party made up mostly, but not entirely, of internationals.

In fact, a Dutch woman seated across from us agreed. She’d recently moved to The Hague after living in Groningen for the past few years and was apparently also struggling to meet people.

It’s an oft-heard complaint in international circles.

Pretty much every organisation catering to internationals in the Netherlands has some advice for how to achieve this virtually impossible feat.

“Many locals have their own social groups that they have maintained since childhood,” the Leiden International Center patiently explains.

The city of Amsterdam sets the bar low. “A neighbour doesn’t have to become a friend (although they might!) – even just being on nodding terms with the people living around you can help you feel at home,” it advises.

There are dozens of threads on Reddit from the recently relocated who are struggling to find connections amongst the Dutch.

True to form, one Dutch poster replies: “We don’t know you, you might just be unlikable for all we know.”

While this may be harsh – sorry, direct – it’s also probably the truth.

You might not be unlikeable in an existential sense. You’re probably a nice person who has friends and loved ones that just happen to live elsewhere. But to the average Tina, Henk and Luca, you just don’t bring much to the table.

First, let’s start with the idea that Dutch people establish their social roster before evacuating the womb.

It is true, in my experience, that Dutch people maintain the friendships they made in childhood and university. This is also true of literally everyone. I concede that the country is small, which makes it easier to keep up with those friendships.

But really, most of us make our friends prior to our early 20s. You just choose to leave yours behind for clogs and tulips. Now your lineup is empty and you’re clawing for a position on a team with few openings.

Which leads me to my second point: there is a reason most of us make friends early in life. It is significantly easy to make friends prior to reaching adulthood. The foundations of primary school friendships are “The other child was randomly selected to sit next to me” and “Who wants to play the same game at recess.” You go to school all day, you see these people all the time and you haven’t yet been downtrodden by the stresses of life.

Now you need to find more of a connection than “I like playing in the sandbox with you” and you need to find the time to make that connection, somewhere between working, exercising, raising your children, spending time with your partner and remembering to order a shower curtain. (If my husband is reading this, I am sorry – I forgot again.)

Even the aforementioned Dutchie at my dinner party was struggling. It’s not simply because you’re a foreigner, it’s just hard to make friends post-graduation.

It is, however, also because you are a foreigner. Dutch people do speak English but that doesn’t mean they want to speak their second language all the time. The language barrier also makes it harder for you to mesh into a group. If you make a Dutch friend and they invite you to their birthday party, you’re now forcing everyone in the circle to switch to English.

Plus, you don’t share the same cultural references, the same jokes, the same base understanding of the world. None of this is insurmountable but it all makes it more difficult to form a bond.

If you came here looking for advice on how to make friendships with the Dutch, you’re in the wrong place. This isn’t an advice column. Making friends as an adult is challenging and you’re playing that game on hard mode by trying to do it across cultural and language differences.

In the meantime, you can try just nodding at people. Maybe eventually one of them has just moved from Groningen and is also desperately trying to convince others that they are likable.