The Loneliness No One Talks About as an Expat

As I mentioned in my previous post, our difficulty in finding the right tenants for our properties has made 2026 a financial and emotional migraine. But that’s not the only reason my husband and I have been having such a rough time this year.

For some reason, we’ve become very aware of how lonely it can be to be expats in Argentina. Many of the Argentine friends we thought would be there for us through thick and thin have turned their backs on us.

One of them wasn’t much of a surprise, really. The truth is, he had been emotionally unstable throughout most of his friendship with my husband. Only recently did I learn that the main reason he was ever friendly with me was because I was married to his “bae,” as he liked to call my husband. He had no interest in me whatsoever. To be honest, it wasn’t exactly a secret given that he was always acting like he was trying to get into his pants, and when that didn’t work out, he seemingly moved on and went radio silent on my husband.

Another friend, someone I had reached out to daily from August of last year through early January, cut ties with me in a diplomatic but still hurtful way. I still don’t know what brought that on. She had asked for daily affirmations that everything was going to be okay, which my husband and I agreed to give her. The hubs got tired of it and stopped, but I knew how important it can be to feel like someone is in your corner, so I kept going.

To make things more interesting, I even created an ongoing story using AI generated images. It turned into a kind of comic book style narrative with a sci fi drama vibe, featuring celebrities like Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Katie Holmes. Sometimes I included her in it too. The AI couldn’t recreate her exact likeness, but I made versions from the side or from behind. You get the idea. It was something I put real time and thought into, and it came from a genuine place of friendship.

Here's a sample page of the makeshift comic. Keep in mind that I would usually just send one or two images per day.

Then, a few days after the new year, she politely asked me to stop, saying it wasn’t necessary to continue. Fair enough. I wasn’t going to keep putting in that kind of effort if it wasn’t wanted. But it was how abruptly it ended that stung. It made us feel like none of it had actually mattered to her.

Since then, she has barely reached out. On the rare occasions she does ask how we’re doing, she never follows up after we respond. In my opinion, that’s just shitty. If you don’t really want to know, then don’t ask.

And she’s not the only one.

One thing I’ve noticed with some of the Argentines we’ve befriended is that they’re happy to come over when we host parties. They’ll eat the food, enjoy the moment, and go home with leftovers. But when it comes to actually showing up for us as real friends, things go quiet.

At the same time, our friends and family back home haven’t exactly stepped up to the plate either. On my side, I’m always the one reaching out, and no one checks in on me first. It feels like I’m constantly putting in more than I’m getting back. My husband has gone through the same thing, especially with his family.

When he sends heartfelt messages, the responses are usually just an emoji or a GIF. That might not seem like a big deal if we were living in the States, but we’ve been in Argentina for 14 years and haven’t been able to go back, mostly because of financial struggles. You would think that distance alone would make people put a little more effort into staying connected. Even something as simple as responding thoughtfully or engaging with what we share online would go a long way.

We don’t want shitty GIFs or random YouTube videos. We want an actual conversation. Something as simple as “How are you?” would mean more than people probably realize.

I guess what this year has really done is strip away a lot of the perceptions we had about the people we loved. It’s shown us who shows up, who doesn’t, and how uneven some of our relationships really are.

And maybe that’s the hardest part to process. Not just the loneliness, but the realization that sometimes the connections we thought were solid were never as deep as we believed.

It’s strange. Moments like these remind me of a scene from Superman with Christopher Reeve, when Lex tells Miss Teschmacher and Otis that his father taught him, “People are no damn good.”

I’m starting to think he might have been right.