Belonging of place and belonging of people.

A tale about British boxes.

This could be an essay about the hundreds of cardboard boxes I have used to move house since living in the UK. But it’s not.

When I moved to this country eight years ago, nobody was surprised. I had been droning on and on about this place all my life and after spending a year here and going back to Germany, I told anyone who would listen that I would move here for good one day. People who hear me talk about the UK joke that I sound like its ambassador. And I really do. There are many things I adore about this country.

I have often been asked if there is anything I don’t like about living here. After all this time, I am definitely past the honeymoon phase and I see it with sober eyes. The good and bad. Every place has both, there is no perfect country. Which place is right for you depends on what you value the most.

And this is where things have slowly been changing for me.

All my life I thought of the UK as my soul home. As someone who grew up in between cultures, a place as multicultural as this has felt the closest to belonging I have ever been able to find.

But the older I get the more I realise the harsh difference between belonging of place and belonging of people. This difference doesn’t exist for everyone, but it can be a reality for many third culture people.

It seems like a bizarre distinction, but I am painfully aware of its presence in my life. I feel incredible belonging in London as a city. The energy of the place feels like slipping into comfortable shoes. Like home. An expansive space where it doesn’t matter that I don’t have any national pride and sense of national identity - because it is a whole world in one city. Even just being on British soil makes me feel a sense of freedom I didn’t feel in a place like Germany for example.

But when I am in a room full of Brits only, that feeling of belonging goes out the door. And often, I go with it. It’s in those moments that I realise how much I need my third culture people. I need the ones who know. I need the ones who feel about life the way I feel about life, without having to explain myself or trying to be apologetic about who I am and feel like an alien.

I don’t feel belonging to people here. Really connecting with someone in a deep way is difficult when you are always excluded from big parts of their life and kept in a box. This is the hardest thing about living in the UK:

The boxes.

Most of my close friends and community I build around me are not British - they are immigrants like me. People who moved to this country as grown ups. And we all have the same tales to tell.

Being friends with Brits means being compartmentalised and forever kept in a box, separated from the rest of their lives.

You will rarely (if ever) meet any of their other friends, their family members or even partners. If you do get the honour of a formal introduction, it will most likely be a one-off, like a birthday party.

A woman I knew when I lived in Brighton told me she had never met any of her husbands friends. She said it with a sense of pride even. They had been married for ten years.

I have been in a married household and a single one - in both lives I have always kept it the same: hanging out at mine and my friends houses was usually a mix of having food with people you knew and people you didn’t know (yet). We would always bring together our friends, our friends’ friends and family members. Sleepovers, Road trips, movie nights - they were rarely exclusive. If my parents would come to mine for Sunday lunch, I would often have my friend and her kids over as well. A table of 9 people who don’t usually hang out with each other was no rarity at my house.

Such things are a non-starter in the UK.

Brits are kind and polite in all areas of public life - it is generally a joy and a pleasant experience to be a customer in this country. If you have experienced customer service in Germany, you know what I am talking about :)

However that politeness carries over into friendships too.

There is always a bit of distance between you and them. Always an arms length.

This is not a problem to Brits at all - because to them this is normal relating. And there is nothing inherently wrong with it - it’s simply frustrating when you are used to doing life differently. When you desire to do it differently. It always feels like a missing connection.

I don’t know what the loneliness statistics are in this country. According to Google, Sweden is the loneliest country in the world because of the high number of people living alone. But with such a massive homelessness crisis and so many mental health cases you meet on the streets - you do have to wonder if those societal issues are partly due to all of the relationships boxes that exist here. People fall off to the sides because they are alone in a box. And can never cross over to another.

Brits meet outside: lunches, dinners, after-work pub, scheduled friendships. This is where connections happen. When you do that long enough, the relationship just doesn’t feel real. Where do you live? Who is your family? Who are your other friends? What do they love? How do they laugh? How are you around them? What about your mother is similar to you and what is different? What do you look like in the morning? What colours do you have in your home?
Not knowing other parts of a friends life means not knowing them fully.

When I moved to Brighton, an ‘edgy, creative’ looking place, I quickly realised that people were still very traditional at the core. Chasing the partner, the house and the child. Most people around me still fled into the apparent safety of a romantic partnership, because such is the conditioning of Capitalism. Keeping friendships limited to the pint at the pub, the hen-dos and baby showers, the yoga classes and special events in the diary. Community is something you have to spend money on. But don’t let community enter your house.

“Hey, we are in your area, can we pop in?” those are the friendships I am used to.
Yes, we have busy lives - but there is no denying relationships are done differently here. In the cultures I come from, whether you are partnered up or not - there is more togetherness in the way people live inside all their relationships. Togetherness is prioritised in a way it is not in the UK.

A lot of friendships here happen online, on the phone, they happen in the diary, four weeks from now, in between, the empty filler moments when your boyfriend isn’t available - but not IRL. Not up close.

I miss weekends spent together, that go from lunches, to afternoon naps and carry into dinners, because you don’t want to say goodbye. Brits don’t do this, unless it’s with a romantic partner. With non-British friends of mine, this is a regular occurrence.

In Britain, there is always a clock on being together. This is how you know that your time is up babe: ”So what are your plans for the rest of the day?”

When you hear that sentence, it’s your cue to leave, dear Non-Brit.

The first time I went to Francesca and Antonios house, Italians I met in Brighton, while I was still in the hallway taking my shoes off, the first question I heard from the kitchen was: ”Are you hungry?” I remember smiling in that moment. Because I had not heard that question from anyone since moving to England. That day we had lunch, endless conversation, watched a movie, went for a walk and then I stayed for dinner too. Just a normal day in our friendship, one we would have many more times in the future - with a few more people added into the mix.

I have had British friends over the years whose homes I have never stepped foot in, despite knowing them for a long time and them coming to my house.

Brits are not big community builders - I am not talking about paid communities.

I have no idea if they are aware of it, but British people compartmentalise every relationship in their lives:
The work friends, the pub friends, the weekend friends, the romantic relationship, the family, the gym friends, the going out-out friends…and so on.

These groups will usually not be mixed.

It’s such a strong contrast to what I know from life in Germany and Italy and how I have lived friendships most of my life. I always mixed and matched all my friends and family. All my life, whether married or single, I would not just meet one individual friend at a time, every time - I also brought friends along to meet my other friends. Friends who didn’t know each other. All my immigrant friends do the same. Someone will always bring someone else along, because that togetherness is embedded in our bones. In Brighton I had a solid community of immigrants. Up until two years ago, when I left Brighton for London - I often found myself at dinner tables consisting of one or two of my close friends plus their siblings, spouses, friends of their spouses, a neighbour, a cousin, and someone’s mum who was visiting. When I messaged my Italian friend if she wanted to go for a walk at the beach or cook dinner the answer was often: “Yeah, so-and-so is at mine, I am bringing them too!” When I am on the phone to my german friend, she always hands the phone to her husband at some point and I talk to him for half an hour too, because we are all a family together. There are no boxes.

If you ask a Brit if they are available to meet and they happen to already have plans with someone else, they will never invite you along. You stay in your box. You never get to mix with any of their other boxes.

Bringing people together is such a normal thing woven into the fabric of how I do love - and it makes it the hardest obstacle to forming deep friendships in the UK. Wait no, I am not the obstacle - this culture is.

Relationships are compartmentalised in the UK and if you are not family, most things happen outside of the home.

”Home” seems to be such a ‘sacred’ thing, my Brits tell me, that they hesitate to let anyone into it. That is reserved for the person they sleep with. And for their own blood.

In the world I come from, home is such a sacred thing that you want others to experience it too. You want people to have a part in that beauty. There is no stinginess with the sacred, but wide open doors.
Putting the sacred on a pedestal is a religious mindset, one I have long denounced. The sacred isn’t high above us - it belongs right here on earth, among us.

My soul craves the togetherness I had before moving to the UK. It craves belonging of people. And after eight years in this country, I realised it’s not going to get that with British people. I tried and tried and I am tired of trying. I have assimilated to some extent, that I now practice my kind of relationship mostly with other immigrants, for whom this kind of thing is normal.
I have accepted that my British friendships consist of WhatsApp messages and a coffee every few weeks. Anything else feels like asking for ‘too much’.

They have a way of relating that doesn’t make space for a lot of physical togetherness. For connecting people in their lives. In every conversation I have about this, they get the concept on an intellectual level, but it never translates into real life. Because it’s deeply cultural.
The individual boxes are not about introvertedness - this is just how people live here.

So while I live in the UK and I am grateful for the freedom I feel here - my closest friendships are predominantly not from here. Belonging of place isn’t the same as belonging to the people of that place. I always keep circling back to find other immigrants and third culture people. We live in our own made-up bubble that happens to be on this island. We could be anywhere else too - do we have to stay here then? Maybe it’s about planting roots in soil with people who want togetherness too. Who don’t look for it in coffeeshops, restaurants, gym classes and in their nuclear family alone - but around a table with friends’ friends, on a couch, in hospital beds, in car rides and in long afternoons lying on the floor. In face to face love, in real life, with an open heart for people who don’t belong.

Maybe that’s the crux: When you have belonging of people - to a family, a partner, you don’t understand why you should make room for people who don’t.

Maybe people who don’t belong, understand the pain of it and the importance of opening their homes to others who don’t belong either.