I Struggled to Find My Tribe as an Immigrant in America

By Mehak Siddiquei

My friend’s circle remained pretty stable in my late teens and early 20s, a time when supposedly the turnover rate for friendships can be very high. I was a typical introverted nerd who was lucky to find a group of close-knit friends who somehow stayed close through high school, college, and till grownup stuff like marriages and babies started happening to us.

Friendship like gardening requires patience, nourishment, love, and time to flourish. As each of us took turns to settle down and give the married life a chance our time was demanded elsewhere and slowly, without us even noticing, we drifted apart. A few of us moved to different countries and periodic updates on Whatsapp became the primary way for us to stay in touch. We still share the major events happening in our lives with each other — like my friend’s text in our group chat announcing that she is in labor which I received just now — but I no longer have friends or even a friend who I can meet up with often and who would fulfill my need for a social life.

Many people believe that you lose two friends when you fall in love. This overused statistic is remarkable in its specificity as well as its surprising allusion to there being something negative about falling in love. More than a decade has passed since the original research at the University of Oxford that produced this stat was conducted, but it keeps popping up in popular discourse about friendship time and again. Oddly enough, I too lost exactly two friends as I got married.

Coupled with moving to a different country for grad school, my friends’ circle took a big hit. Busy with studies and a newly added long-distance husband to my life, making new friends was not on my list. Any time that I was not studying was spent traveling to Dallas from Chicago so that we could be together.

Fast forward a few years: when the pandemic hit and my daughter was born, I resigned from my job and took on the role of a stay-at-home mother. While my husband and I have no close relatives in Dallas, he found like-minded people here at his cricket club. When the frustration of round-the-clock parenting gets to me, I envy him sometimes. “You have a social circle and I don’t!” I tell him angrily when he meets up with them on the weekend and I find myself without anyone with whom I can share the stories from my daily life. He naively suggests that I try and wiggle my way into the wives club of his friends. If only making friends was that easy.

“Babies are the killer for any kind of social life for everyone,” says psychologist Robin Dunbar. Our 30s is the decade where friendships go to die, according to science journalist Lydia Denworth.

“The average American spends just 41 minutes a day socializing, but Jeffrey A. Hall, a communication-studies professor at the University of Kansas, estimates that it typically takes more than 200 hours, ideally over six weeks, for a stranger to grow into a close friend.”

— Katharine Smyth writes in The Atlantic

All these facts point to the negligible chance of me finding a brand new close friend at this point in my life. I have a demanding toddler, an introverted personality (I would rather read a book than talk to a stranger in a social setting), and limited time on my hands.

To top it all, being an immigrant can make it difficult to find someone who shares enough characteristics with you that would precipitate a friendship. The limited pool of people similar to me causes me to appear snobbish for claiming to not find a person with friend potential in the two years since I moved to Dallas.

Dunbar, in his new book on friendship, explains the concept of circles of friendship. According to him, our social circle comprises concentric circles with the innermost containing our most intimate and dear relationships likely romantic ones, the next circle adds five relationships with those people who are our shoulders-to-cry-on. “They are the ones who will drop everything to support us when our world falls apart,” he explains. The next circle adds 15 more to the inner circles and together these form the people we usually hang out with and who we trust enough to let them watch our children for us.

Reading about this made my heart ache. This hidden cost of being an immigrant became manifest to me when I decided to stay at home and no longer had work or school acquaintances to keep me occupied. When people think about immigrants and friendship they usually visualize communities that stick together finding comfort in those that remind them of home and people back home think about the fancy new people you will meet and become close with in a land far away. The reality lies somewhere in between.

When I think about my concentric circles of friendship apart from the innermost circle, the rest appear blank. I do not know what to fill in these. Thousands of miles separate me from my family and friends so I definitely do not hang out with them nor do I have anyone to watch my daughter for me if needed. Distance has wedged a huge gap in my social life and filling it in has proved harder than I imagined.

I am in no hurry to find a close friend even though the time is ticking and I am almost 30. These things can't be rushed and all the intriguing research produced on friendship cannot be used as a guide. Even Robert Dunbar thinks that “if you try and apply rules consciously, everything in all these natural sequences just falls apart.”

So as I wait for a kindred spirit, like the one Anne found in Diana in Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, I look forward to snuggling in a blanket with a book for my much-prized me-time and hope that a friend lies somewhere on the horizon for me.

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Mehak Siddiquei is a Texas-based, stay-at-home mom. With training in Economics and Global Affairs, she previously worked in various research positions relating to public policy and economic development. She is interested in parenting, traveling, reading, and writing about it all.

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