The proportion problem: why belonging in Brussels takes longer than you think
Why making friends here is structurally hard - and what that means for you
For my first 3 years in Brussels, I lived inside a bubble.
I worked in the EU quarter. My colleagues came from everywhere - Italy, Germany, Greece, Romania, you name it. We had lunch together, complained about the same things, went to the same after-work drinks in Place Luxembourg. It felt like a social life. It looked like one from the outside.
But it wasn’t enough, and it never had been. I come from a place with a high rate of immigration, and I’ve always believed that groups living parallel lives without any contact is bad for everyone. I didn’t want to be another foreigner sealed inside a foreigners-only world. From the very first days I thought: I want to meet Belgians.
And then, of course, life happened. A ton of things to think about, including finding another job after my internship, which was not easy. And there was a more basic obstacle: I couldn’t speak Dutch or French. Not yet. So despite the intention, the real contacts didn’t come. I was stuck inside the bubble almost by default, not by choice.
During my internship I had two main Belgian colleagues. One was a French-speaking Walloon who had lived in Brussels for a long time. The other was a Flemish lady who commuted in from outside the city. For me it was fascinating just to watch them talk, but they spoke in French, and my French at the time was not magnificent. A lot of the time I couldn’t keep up with their pace. I spent a significant amount of time eavesdropping on the Flemish lady’s phone calls, which gave me an unexpected immersion in the sounds of Dutch. I was a spectator. An observer. I used to think: when will I be able to join them?
Things started to shift in 2019, during the European elections. My commune, Ixelles, sent me a form inviting me to register to vote for the Belgian list. I held it and thought about it. I had some imposter syndrome: I was such a new immigrant, did I have the right to vote as if I belonged here? But then I thought: this could be a real way to learn about the country. So I made myself a deal. If I couldn’t find the equivalent Italian registration form within twenty minutes, I would register for the Belgian list instead. The Italian diplomatic services website was, predictably, a mess. Twenty minutes passed. Belgian it was.
It sounds small. But politics turned out to be one of the most natural entry points into real Belgian life, at least for my personality. I started going to events organized by Belgian parties. I remember one specifically where someone spoke about Italy in a way that made me think: this person actually knows what’s going on over there. That was genuinely surprising, and genuinely exciting.
And that’s when the connection with my Walloon colleague deepened. She noticed I wasn’t tourist-curious. I was asking questions at a different level, showing up at events she wouldn’t have expected a new Italian immigrant to attend. We shared similar views, which helped. She started inviting me to things. Over the years, she became, and still is, the only person from that period I’m still in touch with.
That small thing, genuine interest in her country and her city, not the EU district, not the expat bar scene, but her Brussels, is what cracked something open. We became friends. Slowly, the way friendships form in Belgium, and actually even more so after COVID than right after I left the job. But it started there.
I’m telling you this because I spent a long time feeling like I didn’t know what to do. Like there was no path in. I had quit Italy specifically to find new roots - and here I was, unable to find where to start from
I was introverted. I was busy. My French was miserable until 2021 and my Dutch didn’t exist yet. There was a voice in the back of my head telling me this city was impossible to crack.
But here’s what I’ve come to believe, and it’s a little counterintuitive: Brussels is actually a place where social accidents happen. More than in my hometown. You go to the same café a few times, you’re kind, you bring your glass back when you leave, and the person behind the counter starts recognising you, stops giving you a number to remember your order when you go sit at a table, makes some jokes. That happened to me recently at a place near where I work. It’s a small thing. It’s also not nothing.
Brussels rewards repetition and proximity the same way any city does. The difference is that Brussels is also extraordinarily fragmented. If you don’t take the first step out of your own bubble, you will stay perfectly contained inside it indefinitely. The international community is large enough to be self-sufficient. You can live an entire life here without ever needing to leave it.
That’s a structure problem.
And if I stop for a moment and ask myself: did my Italian compatriots behave any differently toward the immigrants arriving in Milan or Rome? No. Of course not. People grow up with their own friendship circles, their own rhythms, their own already-full social lives. Expecting a country to pause and welcome you is a fantasy, a flattering one, but a fantasy.
What made me think of this was my trip to Iran in 2015. Iranians are famously warm with foreigners, and they are, genuinely. But the reason is specific: foreigners are rare there, they carry a kind of symbolic weight, they represent the outside world that many Iranians are curious about or connected to through family abroad. A traveller who smiles when they hear the word “Iran”, after decades of the country’s reputation being defined by others, means something. That warmth is real, but it has a context.
Brussels is the opposite context. There are hundreds of thousands of internationals here. Being foreign is not interesting. It is not a novelty. It gives you nothing by default.
Which means the question is not “why won’t Belgians let me in” but “what reason have I given anyone, specifically, to open a door?”
Most internationals I’ve met here never quite reach that question. They try harder at the wrong things: more expat meetups, more after-work drinks with people who are also just passing through. And when it doesn’t work, they conclude something is wrong with them, or with Brussels.
I want to offer a different diagnosis.
Brussels can feel hard to belong to, but I’m not sure it requires a fundamentally different approach than any other city. The mechanism is the same everywhere: people have full lives, existing circles, no particular reason to open a door to a stranger. What makes Brussels unusual is proportion. There are so many internationals here that Belgians are quite literally outnumbered in large parts of the city. When you are surrounded by foreigners everywhere you go, you stop noticing them. You retreat into your own world. That’s not hostility. It’s just what happens when the numbers get extreme enough.
Paris is different because the proportion is different. Berlin, from what I hear, may actually be closer to Brussels in this sense: English everywhere, international crowd, similar dynamics.
This newsletter is about that path.
Over the next weeks I’ll map out my own parcours. It won’t be fast. But it’s not luck either.