The adjustment curve moving abroad sets off has a well-studied shape, and its low point usually isn’t the first week. In the 1955 study that first drew it, Norwegian Fulbright scholars in the United States who’d been there six to twelve months reported more trouble than those in their first six months or past eighteen. Month nine sits right in the middle of that window.
It’s also, for a lot of people, the month the paperwork runs out.
People plan the arrival in enormous detail. Flights, shipping, the apartment, the residence card appointment, which neighborhood, whether the bakery’s any good. Months of it.
Almost nobody plans month nine.
I live in Spain, and from everything I read and hear, money gets far more planning than anything on this page.
What follows is the shape of the curve, what the research actually supports (less than the internet claims), and the one survey that shows, country by country, how hard it is to get in.
The adjustment curve moving abroad sets off, stage by stage
The table is my reading of the classic curve, mapped onto a first year abroad. The months are approximate. The order is the useful part.
| Stage | Roughly when | What it feels like | What’s going on underneath |
|---|---|---|---|
| Absorption | Months 1–3 | Everything’s new, so everything’s interesting | Difficulty registers as texture, and setup keeps you busy |
| Competence | Months 4–8 | You can pay a bill and order dinner | The admin is ending, and it was giving your weeks their shape |
| The dip | Somewhere in months 6–12 | Flat, restless, oddly homesick | The tasks are done and nothing has replaced them yet |
| Settling, or leaving | Year two | It gets easier, or it doesn’t | Mostly decided by whether you got in socially |
The early months are hard in obvious ways. You can’t read your mail. The bank wants a document nobody can name. The immigration office moved, and the new address is only posted in a language you don’t have yet.
Obvious difficulty is survivable. You expected it, and when it arrives it confirms the story you told yourself before you left: you’re someone having an adventure.
What you didn’t expect is the point where the novelty ends and you find out whether anything grew underneath it.
By then you’ve proved you can manage. What’s left is a different question: is there anything here for me? That one’s harder, and it’s the one that sends people to look at flights.
What the research actually supports
Less than the diagrams suggest.
The U-shaped curve comes from Sverre Lysgaard’s study of those Norwegian Fulbright grantees. Five years later the anthropologist Kalervo Oberg popularized the term culture shock, along with the idea of a honeymoon stage that ends. Between them they gave the world the picture most relocation guides still use.
Then someone tested it properly. In 1998, Colleen Ward and three colleagues followed 35 Japanese students in New Zealand, measuring them within 24 hours of arrival and again at four, six and twelve months. Their paper found no U at all. Depression and social difficulty were highest at arrival and fell from there.
So the dip isn’t a law of nature. Some people have their worst month in week one and improve steadily after it.
That’s worth knowing.
My read, and it’s only that: the U fits people whose first months come with built-in structure. Students get orientation. Retirees get a year of paperwork. When the structure ends, the gap shows. If your first months are unstructured and lonely from day one, you’re more likely on Ward’s curve than Lysgaard’s, and the hardest part may already be behind you.
What 7,786 people abroad say about year two
The curve tells you when it might get hard. It doesn’t tell you whether it gets better. For that, the most useful public data I know is InterNations’ Expat Insider survey.
The 2026 edition collected answers from 7,786 people of 162 nationalities in 31 destinations, each with at least 50 respondents. It asks the questions that decide whether someone stays: is it easy to make local friends, are locals friendly toward foreigners, do you feel at home, are you happy with your social life.
The global baseline is sobering. Only 39% say making local friends is easy, and 40% say it’s hard. 63% find locals friendly. 61% feel at home. 54% are happy with their social life.
Then the countries pull apart. Far apart.
| Country | Settling-in rank, of 31 | What stands out (global figure in brackets) |
|---|---|---|
| Mexico | 1 | 73% say making local friends is easy (39%); 34% say their friends are mostly locals (17%) |
| Panama | 2 | 90% say locals are friendly (63%); first overall in 2026 |
| Thailand | 3 | Third for settling in and third overall |
| Germany | 28 | 57% say making local friends is hard (40%); 43% say locals are friendly (63%) |
| Sweden | 30 | Second from the bottom for settling in |
| Norway | 31 | Last in every subcategory: 72% find local friends hard (40%), 25% are happy with their social life (54%), 31% feel at home (61%) |
Mexico’s second number is the one I’d look at first. Plenty of places are pleasant to foreigners while keeping them at arm’s length for good. A third of people saying their friends are mostly locals is what integration looks like when it actually happens.
Germany is the one that catches Americans out, because it looks so practical on paper. Good healthcare, real cities, plenty of English. And people clearly go: 23,679 people were collecting US Social Security retirement benefits there in December 2025, more than in Spain and Portugal combined. The survey suggests a fair number of them find it hard to get in.
Choose the country for year two
Year one is hard everywhere. What the country decides is whether year two is different.
In Mexico, with 73% reporting easy friendships, the odds that year two feels different are on your side. In Norway, where fewer than one in three feel at home, the numbers suggest year two looks a lot like year one.
This is the part people resist, because it says effort matters less than location. A sociable person in Norway lands where 72% find local friends hard. A shy person in Mexico lands where 73% find them easy. You can’t out-charm a gap that size.
Rent you can renegotiate. A visa you can change. This you can’t.
Couples hit it on a different schedule
Everything above describes one person. A couple arrives with a social unit built in, and it carries them through the setup months comfortably. So the dip can come later, or it can come to one of them and not the other.
That second version is the one to watch for. One partner builds a routine, a class, a few local faces. The other doesn’t. By the end of the first year they’re having two different experiences of the same move, and the one without a life of their own leans harder and harder on the one with it.
The fix is the same as for someone alone, only more urgent: each person needs one weekly obligation that isn’t the other person. Separate, not shared.
Three things people get wrong about the dip
“It hits everyone at month nine.” It doesn’t. Month nine is a midpoint of the window the early research described, not a date on a calendar, and the 1998 study found the worst point at arrival. Use the stage, not the month.
“If I try harder, I’ll push through.” Effort helps, but the survey measures countries, not personalities. Trying harder in the hardest country on the list is still trying in the hardest country on the list.
“Going home puts everything back where it was.” It costs flights, shipping in the other direction, a broken lease, visa fees you won’t see again, and whatever the exchange rate did while you were away. If you’re 65 or older and dropped Medicare Part B abroad, Medicare adds 10% to the premium for each full 12 months you went without it, for as long as you have Part B. The standard premium is $202.90 a month in 2026. I’ve put the full list of what restarts in moving back to the US.
What the survey can’t tell you
Three limits, and they matter.
It isn’t broken out by age. The results describe everyone who answered, and a 35-year-old relocating with an employer isn’t having the same experience as a 67-year-old retiring on their own.
It measures how people feel about making friends. Not how many they made.
And it only surveys people who are still there. Anyone who already went home isn’t in the sample, so if anything these numbers flatter every country. The 31% who feel at home in Norway are 31% of the ones who stayed.
What helps before month nine arrives
Not much, but a few things.
One obligation that repeats every week. A class, a volunteer shift, a sport. Something that puts you in the same room with the same people on the same day, because that’s how most adult friendships form.
Enough language to lose a conversation in public. The bar that matters sits well below fluency: being willing to start a conversation you might not finish.
No hard country for a practical reason. The mistake I’d most want to avoid is choosing Germany or a Nordic country for the healthcare and the order, then finding out that what you actually needed was someone to have dinner with.
Name the stage before it comes. People who expect a dip read it as a stage. People who don’t read it as proof they made a mistake, and act on that.
And take it seriously if it doesn’t lift. The World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection found that loneliness affects 1 in 6 people worldwide and that social isolation affects up to 1 in 3 older adults. It links loneliness to more than 871,000 deaths a year. If the low stays for weeks, see a doctor, the same way you would at home.
If you’re planning this move on your own, the setup looks different, and I’ve written the first 90 days out week by week in moving abroad alone after 50.
The survey’s free. Spend an hour with it before you spend eight months comparing apartments.
