Last month, Internations released the results of their Expat Insider 2025 Survey. Sweden did really well on a lot of metrics and well… not so great on others. In the categories of Quality of Life, Working Abroad and Expat Essentials, Sweden ranked in the middle of the field. Not too bad. Unfortunately, when it comes to Ease of Settling In, Sweden falls to 42nd out of 46 places. Oof. What happened?
I think we have a perfect storm of contributing factors.
- Expectations coming in
- Established lives in place
- Swedish self-sufficiency
1. Buddhism teaches that expectations are the source of all suffering. There is a lot of truth to this regardless of who is involved in what situation and moving to a new country is certainly no exception. Let’s imagine a young Spaniard moves to Sweden with his family. He’s seen pictures of Swedish forests and thinks, “I like hiking; I like grilling. This will be the country for me!” He tries again and again to interest colleagues in meeting up for a hike on the weekend, but they politely put him off and when he finally finds some other internationals to take him up on his offer, it rains the whole day. Are the colleagues at fault for not having time? Should we blame the weather gods for not fulfilling this young man’s dream of a sunny hike?
2. Why don’t the colleagues have time? It turns out, they have families themselves. Their children have handball matches and horses to take care of. They own flats and sommarstugas that need maintaining. Their group of grade school or university friends have plans for the weekend. They have full lives already. The family from Spain identifies a couple of other likable families among their childrens’ preschool set and invites them to come over for coffee. The Swedish family pulls out their smart phones and scrolls through the calendar to six weeks from now. Then they would have 1,5 hours in between other activities. It’s hard to build a friendship on that, but it’s nobody’s fault. It is a simple structural issue of mismatched needs.
3. Swedes don’t actually need much at all from others. They are wonderfully independent and capable and presume that everyone else is too. The Spanish family has figured out how to visit the doctor, gotten BankID sorted out and learned that in Sweden, it doesn’t take a village to raise children, it only requires one parent. They’ve become quite self-sufficient, but there’s one nut they haven’t been able to crack yet. How on earth do the Swedes expect them to be friends on their own, independently of other people? Of course that sounds silly and no Swede would ever claim that, but logic and facts make no difference in the hearts of the lonely Spanish family.
As an immigrant myself, I am very familiar with this conversation. I have it over and over and over again within the international community here in Lund and the stories I hear run the gamut from total ease of fitting in with Swedish culture (the exception, to be sure) to feeling like it was a mistake to move here and actively planning to leave again. So how can it be fixed? Or does it need to be?
I want to dive into this topic more deeply. Consider for just a few moments and it becomes blindingly clear how many facets there are to this situation – too many for a one-page blog post. I’m going to spend some time thinking about it and revisit this topic next month, but I would love to hear from you in the meantime: What does a good friendship look like to you and do you have any successful cross-cultural friendships?
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