Scene 1: “We Should Totally Hang Out!”
- Mateo Rojas, 17, from Medellín, Colombia
For Mateo Rojas, the 17-year-old exchange student from Colombia, the first week at his Minnesota high school was amazing. Everyone was so friendly.
“Oh my gosh, I love your accent!”
“You’re from Colombia? That’s so cool!”
“We should totally hang out sometime!”
At least ten classmates said that last one. Mateo wrote down their names. A month later, he had hung out with exactly none of them. In the hallways, people smiled and waved, “Hey, Mateo!” and kept walking.
He messaged his best friend, Santi, back in Medellín: “Everyone here is so nice. And nobody is my friend. I feel fooled.”
Scene 2: Six Months of Silence
- Chidi Okafor, 28, from Enugu, Nigeria
- Jonas Weber, Chidi’s labmate
When Chidi Okafor, the Nigerian PhD student, first arrived in Freiburg, he shared a lab with another PhD student, Jonas Weber. For six months, Jonas was helpful and polite. He showed Chidi how to use the equipment, answered every question, and said “Morgen” every morning. But he never asked a personal question, never suggested a beer after work, and never mentioned what he did on the weekend. Chidi decided that Jonas didn’t like him.
Then, one afternoon in early December, Jonas stopped by Chidi’s desk, slightly red in the face.
“Chidi… you’re not going home for Christmas, right? My parents live in a village in the Black Forest. Would you like to come for Christmas Eve? My mother insists.”
Chidi went. Jonas’s mother hugged him at the door. His grandfather asked a hundred questions about Nigeria. They all walked through the snow to midnight Mass in the village church, and on Christmas Day, Chidi cooked jollof rice. Jonas’s grandmother asked for the recipe.
The Other Side
Mateo’s host sister, Emma, explained. “‘We should hang out’ is just a friendly thing to say. It means ‘I like you.’ It’s not a promise. If you actually want to hang out, you have to follow up, like text them: ‘Want to get pizza on Friday?’”
Mateo stared at her. “So I have to do the inviting?”
“Kind of, yeah. And join stuff, like a club or a team. That’s where people make real friends here.”
He joined the chess club. Within two weeks, he had two real friends, both terrible at chess.
For Jonas, those six months weren’t coldness. “I don’t use the word ‘friend’ lightly,” he said. “I needed to get to know you first. In Germany, many of us keep a clear line between colleagues and friends. But once someone is on the friend side of that line, it’s for life.” After that Christmas, Jonas became Chidi’s closest friend in Germany. (In Lesson 8.1, you’ll see just how loyal a friend he is.)
What’s Going On?
Peaches and coconuts
In the 1930s, the psychologist Kurt Lewin, who had moved from Germany to the United States, noticed something. Americans were open and friendly with almost anyone, very quickly, but their truly private inner circle was small and hard to enter. Germans seemed more closed at first, but once you got through, the friendship went deep. Later writers summed up his idea with two fruits:
- Peach cultures are soft on the outside: friendly, open and happy to chat, even with strangers. But there’s a hard stone at the center, a private core that few people reach.
- Coconut cultures have a hard shell: reserved, formal and private with strangers. But once you crack it, the inside is warm and generous.
The US and Brazil are often described as peach cultures. Germany, Finland, Poland and Russia are often described as coconuts.
Neither style is fake, and neither is cold. Peach friendliness is real; it just isn’t a promise of deep friendship. Coconut reserve is real too; it isn’t dislike, just a way of saving closeness for people who have earned it.
How friendships form
Around the world, friendships tend to grow from repeated contact, in a few main ways:
- School and university, often the easiest place of all.
- Activities: clubs, sports teams, choirs, volunteering, places of worship.
- Neighborhoods and family networks, especially in many collectivist cultures.
- Work, where in some cultures colleagues become close friends, and in others work and private life stay firmly apart.
Fons Trompenaars calls this last difference specific versus diffuse. In more specific cultures, people keep different areas of life separate, so a colleague is not automatically a friend. In more diffuse cultures, relationships spill across every area of life, and your boss may well come to your wedding.
Why newcomers have to make the first move
Local people already have their friends, families and routines, so they usually aren’t looking for new friends. Newcomers often wait to be invited, while locals assume the newcomers are busy. The result: nobody moves. So newcomers usually have to go first: invite, join, follow up, and keep going after the first “no.”
Postcards
Helsinki, Finland. Kemal, the Turkish game developer married to a Finn, waited three years before Aino’s friends invited him to their summer cottage, their mökki, by a lake. “Now, if I needed to move house at six in the morning, they’d all be there,” he says. “In Finland, friendship is slow, and then it’s forever.”
Kraków, Poland. Olena and Barbara spent four months being very polite to each other. Then, one night when neither of them could sleep, they met in the kitchen at midnight. Barbara made tea, and they talked until three in the morning. “That’s when we stopped being host and guest,” Barbara says.
São Paulo, Brazil. Brazilians often say goodbye with a warm “A gente se vê!” (“See you around!”). Like “we should hang out,” it’s genuinely friendly, and often a little vague.
Utrecht, the Netherlands. Sanne books coffee with friends two weeks ahead in her diary. It isn’t coldness, just planning. And once a Dutch friend has booked you in, they will absolutely turn up.
Try This
- In peach cultures: enjoy the friendliness, follow up with a specific invitation (“Pizza on Friday?”), and join activities.
- In coconut cultures: be patient and keep showing up. Accept small steps, like a coffee or a lunch, and don’t give up after one polite “no.”
- Join things: clubs, sports, choirs, volunteering, religious communities, language exchanges.
- Be the one who invites, and then invite again.
- Remember that both kinds of friendship are real.
Pause and Reflect
- Is your own culture more peach or more coconut? How long does it usually take to become real friends?
- How did you make your closest friends?
Key Takeaways
- In peach cultures, people are friendly quickly, but the inner circle takes longer to reach.
- In coconut cultures, the outer shell is hard, but friendships run deep once you’re in.
- Neither style is fake or cold.
- Newcomers usually have to make the first move, and keep making it.