If yes, lucky you! I’m genuinely happy for you and slightly jealous at the same time! 😅 And if they’re nearby, please take them out for a coffee ASAP. (I promise today’s newsletter will explain this rather unusual opening of mine.)

So, how are you? How’s your week been so far? Mine has been quite something, especially when it comes to calls and conversations.

I’ve had quite a few conversations this week that, although they started in completely different places, somehow ended up touching on the same thing: loneliness. Motherhood, living abroad, freelancing, starting a business, changing careers… Apparently, whatever life adventure we choose, loneliness occasionally invites itself along. Nobody remembers adding it to the guest list, but there it is, making itself comfortable.

And the more I thought about these conversations, the more I realised how familiar they all sounded. Different people, different lives, yet this common longing to have someone who understands what you’re going through without needing a PowerPoint presentation of your entire personal history first.

I’ve been living in Portugal for over ten years now. I’ve become a mother twice, worked in organisations, left organisations, built things of my own and collected a fair number of life transitions along the way. I’ve met wonderful people and made meaningful friendships. The small inconvenience is that most of my closest friends live in other countries. Many of them are expats themselves, which makes sense, I suppose. We understand each other’s lives rather well. We just need to involve airlines whenever we’d like to have coffee together. ✈️

And while I’m fortunate to have a partner and close friends with whom I can share decisions, frustrations, ideas and little victories, I sometimes miss something much more ordinary. Having someone nearby to spontaneously go for coffee with. Someone who understands the chapter of life I’m in because they’re experiencing something similar. Someone who knows the context, gets the jokes and doesn’t require a forty-minute introduction before we get to the actual conversation.

I’ve been thinking about this particular kind of loneliness that comes with changing your life, especially when several changes happen relatively close together. You move abroad and gradually become a spectator to the everyday lives of people back home. You become a parent and discover that some friendships have changed. You leave an organisation, start freelancing or build a business and suddenly the familiar faces, casual conversations, lunch breaks and shared routines disappear. You still have relationships, sometimes wonderful ones, but the community that used to come with a particular chapter of your life isn’t necessarily there anymore.

And then, because human beings are such considerate creatures, people start making decisions on your behalf.

How thoughtful of everyone. Thank you for deciding what I’m interested in, how much time I have, and whether I’d appreciate being included. Very efficient. 🙄

I know most of these assumptions come from good intentions. People genuinely believe they’re being considerate. And sometimes they’re right, we really are exhausted, overwhelmed, unavailable or simply uninterested. But wouldn’t it be easier to just ask? To extend the invitation and allow the other person to decide? To remember that someone having a baby, moving abroad or changing careers hasn’t suddenly lost interest in the rest of humanity?

Sometimes we exclude people while sincerely believing we’re doing them a favour.

And I suspect this becomes particularly painful when life isn’t going well. It’s relatively easy to share the nice parts: the successful business launch, the lovely family photographs, the exciting adventure of starting over in another country. But what about the months when the business is barely paying the bills, your confidence has disappeared somewhere between the unpaid invoices, or motherhood feels considerably less like the beautiful experience everyone promised? What about when you’re struggling with a decision, questioning everything, or wondering whether you’ve made a complete mess of your life?

Those are precisely the moments when having someone who understands can make an enormous difference. And, rather inconveniently, those can also be the moments when we withdraw, stop reaching out or feel least capable of explaining ourselves.

Which brings me to this whole idea of finding your tribe.

Now, here’s the funny part. I’ve spent years, as part of my jobs also, building communities. Actual communities. Bringing people together, creating opportunities for connection, encouraging participation, developing relationships and helping people feel that they belonged to something. And I was good at it.

Yes, I said it. I was good at it. 😎 I worked hard to become good at it, too, so you’ll have to excuse my complete lack of performative modesty. I’ve never understood why we’re expected to whisper about our achievements as though competence were something mildly embarrassing. I worked for mine. I’m quite happy to say so.

Anyway, you can imagine the irony of someone who’s spent years building communities for others sitting here wondering how to build one for herself. Apparently, professional competence doesn’t come with a complimentary personal community. Someone should have mentioned that in the job description. 🤦‍♀️

Of course, there’s a difference between having relationships and having a community. A friendship can be deeply meaningful, but a community offers something beyond individual relationships. Familiar faces, shared routines, a sense of continuity, people who notice when you’re missing, opportunities to participate in one another’s everyday lives. And perhaps most importantly, that quiet reassurance that there’s a place where you belong.

I’ve known for a while that we can outgrow the communities we once belonged to, lose proximity to the people who knew us, and struggle to find our place among the people who know us now. I’ve experienced it myself. And I suspect many of us spend a fair amount of adulthood trying to recreate that sense of belonging without quite knowing how.

Do we need people who’ve experienced the same things as us, or people who can understand our experiences even when their lives look completely different? I think we need both. There’s a particular relief in talking to someone who’s been through something similar. They understand the context, the absurdities, the things we don’t even think to explain. But there’s also something incredibly valuable about someone whose life looks nothing like ours and who still makes the effort to understand.

This week, coincidentally (or perhaps my brain has started organising its own reading programme), I’ve started two books: Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, recommended by a friend, and The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, which has been sitting on my reading list for ages. I’m still at the beginning of both, so I won’t pretend to have extracted some grand wisdom from them just yet. But their subjects feel rather appropriate for the conversations I’ve been having: how we organise ourselves around other people, and what makes coming together meaningful.

I also came across the World Health Organization’s 2025 report on social connection, which estimates that one in six people worldwide experience loneliness. One in six! And the WHO treats loneliness as a public-health and societal issue, recognising that our relationships are shaped by much more than our individual willingness to socialise.

I find that last part important. Because whenever we talk about loneliness, someone inevitably comes along with a wonderfully straightforward solution: “Just put yourself out there!”

Oh, brilliant. Why didn’t anyone think of that before? 🙄

Join a group. Attend an event. Find a networking community. Sign up for something. Start a conversation. Organise a gathering. Make an effort.

And listen, I understand the logic. I know how much effort it takes to bring people together and how important it is that someone takes the initiative. But finding people isn’t the same as building meaningful relationships with them. You can join a mothers’ group and discover that the only thing you have in common is that none of you has slept properly in three years. You can attend entrepreneurial networking events and exchange business cards with people who are very enthusiastic about explaining their services and considerably less enthusiastic about developing a friendship. You can meet someone you genuinely click with, only to discover that coordinating a coffee requires three calendars, childcare arrangements and the logistical expertise of an international conference organiser.

There are people everywhere. Building enduring relationships with them is a different matter.

And this applies to the workplace, too. Some companies spend fortunes trying to manufacture a sense of belonging during carefully organised corporate retreats while overlooking the everyday behaviours that make their employees feel alone. Then there are those organisations that insist they’re one big family. Ah, yes, the corporate family. Where everyone belongs until the next restructuring. 🙃

I’ve always found the idea of community far more honest and useful. You can build a workplace where people feel respected, included and supported, where they trust one another and share responsibility, without pretending that an employment contract makes you relatives. And managers have much more influence over this than another inspirational team-building exercise ever will. People remember whether you listened, whether you included them, whether they could ask for help without feeling incompetent, and whether you noticed when something wasn’t right.

But back to the communities we try to build for ourselves, because here’s another uncomfortable truth.

Sometimes we want a community without particularly wanting to do the work required to create one.

We want people nearby, spontaneous coffees, invitations, familiar faces, friends we can call and little gatherings where everyone feels at home. Ideally, someone else would organise all of this, accommodate our schedules, take the initiative, follow up, and somehow make the whole thing happen without requiring too much of our already limited free time.

I can recognise myself in that occasionally. I’m also fairly certain I’m not alone. 😅

But I know people who are doing everything they’re supposedly meant to do. They reach out, invite people over, organise gatherings, join activities, show up, try again and again. They’re genuinely open to creating new relationships. And they still struggle.

Because community requires participation. Reciprocity. Time. Repetition. The willingness to let people into our lives and to make room for theirs. You can invite someone for coffee, but you can’t make them interested in having a second one. You can create opportunities for people to meet, but you can’t manufacture friendship. And you certainly can’t build a community single-handedly, however competent you might be at organising things.

And perhaps that’s precisely why this question has been bothering me. I understand the principles. I know the work involved. I’ve seen meaningful communities develop. Yet knowing how something works doesn’t necessarily mean you can recreate it in your own life, with the people, time, circumstances and emotional energy available to you. Plus is always easier to do it for others and harder to do it for yourself. 🫣

I don’t have a solution to offer you this week. I don’t even have a clever little framework with five steps to finding your tribe. And believe me, as someone who enjoys building frameworks, that’s quite a disappointment. 🤷🏻‍♀️

What I do have is genuine curiosity about how other people are navigating this.

So tell me, have you found your people? And if you have, how on earth did you do it?

And if you’re still looking, what’s been the hardest part?

I’d genuinely love to hear your experiences, including the attempts that went absolutely nowhere. Those stories deserve some attention, too. We tend to hear plenty about the wonderful communities people have built, and considerably less about the invitations that went unanswered, the groups that didn’t quite fit, or the friendships that never developed despite everyone’s good intentions.

I’m all ears 👂🏼

With love,

Monica