People plan for the arrival. Flights, shipping, the apartment, the first week of paperwork. Almost nobody plans for month nine.
Why the first year is not the test
Everywhere, the first months are difficult in a way that is obvious and therefore survivable. You cannot read your mail. The bank wants a document nobody can name. Your jokes do not land. This is expected, and expected difficulty is tolerable.
What is not expected is the point where the novelty finishes and you find out whether anything grew underneath it. For most people that is somewhere around month nine — not a precise threshold, but the region where the surveys show satisfaction dipping.
What decides whether year two is different
The single strongest predictor is how open the country is to newcomers, and that is measurable. In Mexico, where 73% report that making local friends is easy and a third say their friends are mostly locals, year two usually does look different. In Norway, where only 31% ever feel at home, the evidence suggests year two looks a great deal like year one.
This is the argument for weighting social openness above almost everything else. Rent you can renegotiate. A visa you can change. A country's willingness to let you in socially is fixed before you arrive, and it is the one variable you cannot work around by trying harder.
What it costs to get this wrong
Going home is not free. Flights, shipping, a broken lease, visa fees already spent, and whatever the exchange rate did while you were not looking. It is the most expensive way to discover that a country was pleasant to visit and hard to live in.
What to do with this
Two things, both cheap.
Spend an hour with the survey data before you spend eight months comparing apartments. The percentages are published annually and free to read, and almost nobody planning a move ever opens them.
And set the expectation honestly before you go: the first year is hard everywhere, and the question is not whether it will be hard but whether the place you chose makes the second year easier. That framing alone keeps people from reading a normal month nine as proof they made a mistake.
Sources
InterNations Expat Insider, published annually; HSBC Expat Explorer for income and quality of life comparisons.