You moved to Amsterdam for the right reasons.
Maybe it was the job. Maybe it was the lifestyle — the bikes, the canals, the somehow-charming rain. Maybe it was a relationship, or a master's program, or the simple desire to live somewhere that feels open and international and alive. And for the first few weeks, it was everything you hoped for. You explored the Jordaan. You figured out how to order a broodje at the bakery without embarrassing yourself. You posted a canal photo on Instagram and got 87 likes.
Then the honeymoon ended.
The colleagues you grab borrels with on Fridays are nice, but the conversations don't go deeper than work. The people you matched with on Bumble BFF seemed enthusiastic over text, but nobody actually followed through on meeting up. Your roommate is great, but they already have their own social circle and you're not really part of it. Six months in, you realize something that nobody warned you about: Amsterdam is one of the easiest cities in Europe to move to, and one of the hardest to feel at home in.
The numbers nobody talks about
Amsterdam has over 180,000 registered expats, and that number doesn't include the thousands of international students, digital nomads, and people who technically count as "locals" but grew up somewhere else entirely. By some estimates, nearly a quarter of Amsterdam's population was born outside the Netherlands. On paper, that should make it one of the most social cities in Europe. In practice, it often does the opposite. Studies on expat wellbeing consistently rank the Netherlands among the hardest countries for making friends. Year after year, surveys from organizations like InterNations and Expatica show the same pattern: expats love the infrastructure, the work-life balance, and the quality of life. They struggle enormously with building a social circle.
For expats, this creates a paradox
you're surroundedbypeople, but deeply alone. What loneliness actually looks like When people hear "loneliness," they picture someone sitting in a dark room. But expat loneliness in Amsterdam doesn't look like that. It looks normal. It looks busy. It looks fine. It looks like eating dinner alone in your apartment five nights a week while scrolling through Instagram photos of other people's social lives. It looks like having 200 contacts in your phone but nobody you'd call if you had a bad day. It looks like going to a Meetup event, making awkward small talk with 30 strangers for two hours, and going home feeling more alone than when you arrived. It looks like your third attempt at Bumble BFF, where you matched with someone, exchanged enthusiastic messages for three days, vaguely agreed to "get coffee sometime," and never spoke again. It looks like telling your family back home that everything is great, because how do you explain that you live in one of the best cities in the world and still feel isolated?
The worst part is the guilt.
You moved to Amsterdam voluntarily. You have a good life. You have no "right" to feel lonely. So you don't talk about it. And because you don't talk about it, you assume you're the only one. You're not. Why the usual solutions don't work The standard advice for lonely expats goes something like this: join a sports club, take a Dutch class, go to networking events, download Bumble BFF, check out Meetup. Some of these work. Most of them don't, at least not in the way people hope. The problem with Meetup events and networking drinks is scale. When you put 50 strangers in a bar, the social dynamics default to surface-level small talk. You introduce yourself, you answer "what do you do?" three hundred times, you maybe exchange a LinkedIn connection, and you leave. It's socializing without connection. You were technically around people, but you didn't actually connect with any of them. The problem with Bumble BFF is follow-through. The app is great at matching you with people who seem compatible. It's terrible at getting two busy adults to actually commit to a time and place. Most Bumble BFF matches die in the chat. The intent is there, but the structure isn't. The problem with sports clubs is time. Dutch sports clubs are genuinely excellent for making friends, but they require showing up consistently for months before you break through from "person I see at practice" to "actual friend." If you've just moved to Amsterdam and you're lonely now, being told to join a rowing club and wait three months doesn't help. What all of these solutions have in common is that they treat socializing as the goal. But socializing isn't the same as connecting. You can socialize at a party and go home feeling empty.
Connection requires something different
A shared experience, a reason to be present, and enough intimacy that people drop the performance. What actually works After watching hundreds of people try to build social lives in Amsterdam — and after struggling with it myself — I've noticed that the things that actually work share three qualities. They're small. Big events produce small talk. Small gatherings produce real conversation. The magic number seems to be somewhere between three and six people. Enough to have a dynamic, but small enough that you can't hide. They're structured around an activity. Not "let's hang out," which puts all the pressure on conversation, but "let's do something together," which gives you a shared focus and takes the pressure off. Cooking together, eating together, playing a sport, building something — the activity provides the scaffold for connection. They repeat. One-off events don't build friendships. Recurring experiences with the same people do. The reason Dutch people have such strong friend groups from school is that they spent years seeing the same people in the same context. Frequency and consistency matter more than chemistry.
This is why I built The Dinner Club.
A different approach The Dinner Club is a social dining platform in Amsterdam. The concept is simple: local hosts cook dinner at home and invite two to five strangers to join. Guests browse upcoming dinners on the platform, book a seat, and show up for a home-cooked meal with people they've never met. It works because it checks all three boxes. It's small. A maximum of five guests per dinner means there's nowhere to hide. You will have a real conversation. You will learn someone's name and actually remember it. It's structured around food. Eating together is the oldest social activity in human history. A shared meal provides a natural rhythm — there's a beginning (arrival, introductions, first pour of wine), a middle (the food, the conversation that flows from it), and an end (dessert, exchanging contacts, the walk home). You don't have to figure out what to talk about. The food gives you a starting point, and the rest follows. It repeats. Many guests come back for a second dinner within two weeks. Some become regulars. Some eventually become hosts themselves. The platform creates a recurring reason to sit at a table with people, which is what builds real friendships — not one magical evening, but many ordinary ones. I started The Dinner Club because I was lonely in Amsterdam. I'm Italian, I cook too much for one person, and I was tired of eating alone. So I posted on Reddit and invited strangers to my apartment for lasagna. Three people came. We talked for four hours. Nobody checked their phone. That was the moment I realized: the loneliness problem in Amsterdam isn't that people don't want connection. It's that there aren't enough easy, low-pressure ways to get it. The Dinner Club is one way. Not the only way. But a real one.
What you can do tonight
If this post resonated with you, here are three things you can do right now: Stop pretending you're fine. Loneliness isn't a failure. It's a signal that you need more connection, and it's incredibly common among expats. Naming it is the first step to fixing it. Tell one person. Text a friend, a colleague, or even someone you matched with on Bumble BFF months ago. Say: "Hey, want to grab dinner this week?" Not "we should hang out sometime." An actual invitation, with a day and a time. Most people are waiting for someone else to make the first move. Try a Dinner Club dinner. Not because I built it and I want you to use it, but because it genuinely works. Sitting at a stranger's kitchen table with a home-cooked meal in front of you does something that no app or networking event can replicate. It makes you feel like you belong somewhere.
Browse upcoming dinners in Amsterdam → thedinnerclub.eu
Amsterdam is full of incredible people who are eating dinner alone tonight. You might be one of them. But you don't have to be.
