Making Friends as an Adult in Canada Takes Longer

Join one thing with a fixed weekly time slot before you’ve unpacked the last box. That’s the single most useful piece of advice anyone can give you about making friends as an adult in Canada, and everything below is really just explaining why it works and how to actually do it.

Start with why this hits South Africans a bit harder

Canada has the smallest South African-born population of the countries people typically compare it to — around 51,590 as of the 2021 census, against roughly 224,000 in Australia and 217,000 in the UK. That’s not a small gap. It means the built-in network other emigrants sometimes lean on — the friend of a cousin, the church congregation that already has a South African contingent, the braai crowd that exists before you land — is thinner here than it would be if you’d chosen Perth or London instead. You’re not imagining it. Part of why making friends feels harder in Canada is simply structural: the infrastructure genuinely is smaller.

Understand what you’re actually up against

Adult friendship doesn’t form the way it did at school or university, where proximity did most of the work for you. As an adult, especially a newly arrived one, there’s no shared history, no mutual friends doing introductions, and no institution — like a class timetable — quietly forcing repeat contact. Canadians you meet are, by most accounts, warm and easy to talk to in the moment. Turning “easy to talk to” into an actual friendship takes something a single pleasant conversation doesn’t supply on its own: repetition, over time, without either of you engineering it.

The walkthrough

Step one: pick something recurring, not a one-off. A single meetup, however good, rarely turns into a friendship on its own. A weekly recreational sports league, a regular volunteering shift, a standing gym class or a hobby group that meets on the same night every week does something a one-off never can — it puts you in front of the same people repeatedly without you having to manufacture a reason each time.

Step two: go even when you don’t feel like it, especially early on. The first few sessions of anything new feel awkward for everyone involved, you included. The value shows up around the fourth or fifth time, when people start remembering your name without being reminded.

Step three: be the one who suggests the coffee afterwards. Canadians are frequently described as friendly but slower to move from acquaintance to close friend than some other cultures, which reflects a different pace rather than coldness. If you wait for someone else to make the first move toward something outside the group activity, you may wait a long time. Suggesting it yourself, more than once, isn’t pushy. It’s how it actually happens here.

Step four: expect this to take longer than it did at twenty. Nobody in this piece can honestly tell you a number of weeks or months — it varies too much by person and city to make one up — but treat the timeline as measured in months of repeated contact rather than in a handful of good conversations.

If it still feels slow after a season of trying

That’s common, and it isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong. Keep the recurring commitment going anyway; consistency is doing more work than it feels like in the moment.

Cape2Canada’s blog has more on what the early months in Canada actually feel like, beyond the visa paperwork — worth a look if this is the part you’re stuck on right now.