The Country Where You're Never Alone and the Country Where You Need a Meetup Group

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · 🇨🇦 Canada

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Bangladesh, a stranger at a tea stall can become a thirty-year friendship by the second cup, through a centuries-old institution called adda that requires no app, no RSVP, and no explanation. In Canada, Statistics Canada can tell you, to the decimal point, exactly how much less this is happening: daily in-person socializing with friends has collapsed from 47.9% of people in 1986 to 19.3% in 2022. One culture built relationship-building into its architecture. The other is now writing news stories about a sociology professor explaining why adults need to join meetup groups to make a single friend. If you're moving between these two countries, you are moving between two fundamentally different answers to the question of how a social life actually happens.

Do's & Don'ts

🇧🇩 Bangladesh

🇨🇦 Canada

Bangladesh

The core social institution in Bangladesh has a name: adda, an open-ended, unscheduled conversation among friends, neighbors, or near-strangers that has operated out of village centers, teashops, and urban muhallas for generations (thefinancialexpress.com.bd). It isn't a backup to a busier, more structured social calendar — it is the calendar. Scholar Debarati Sen has traced adda's modern form to the British colonial era, when an emerging educated middle class used it to process a rapidly changing status world; after independence it migrated into Dhaka's growing neighborhoods, picking up formal homes along the way at the University of Dhaka's Teacher Student Centre, Shahbag's Aziz Super Market, and Ramna Park, where poets, journalists, and intellectuals have debated for decades.

What adda does structurally is dissolve the line between "making a friend" and "having a conversation." The culture underneath it is collectivist by any measure — Bangladesh scores just 20 on Hofstede's individualism index, one of the lowest in the world, meaning people are expected to see themselves as members of a family, village, or community first (en.prothomalo.com). Social ties, once formed, come with real reciprocal weight: people are expected to trust their networks for help with nearly any task, not just company. The tradeoff is spatial, not relational: rapid urbanization has shrunk the parks and open muhalla spaces where adda traditionally happened, pushing much of it into restaurants, which cost money and which, by at least one account, make it harder for women specifically to gather and talk as freely as they once did on the street.

Canada

Canada's numbers describe something close to the opposite trajectory. Statistics Canada's long-run data shows the share of people who saw a friend in person on an average day fell from 47.9% in 1986 to 19.3% in 2022 — and the drop was steepest, not among retirees, but among working-age adults 25 to 64, whose daily contact fell from 42% to just 14% over the same period (burnabynow.com). The share of Canadians who worry they aren't spending enough time with friends and family rose from under 34% in 1992 to over 46% in 2022, alongside the highest "pressed for time" rate ever recorded. This isn't a story about Canadians disliking each other; it's a story about a social infrastructure that quietly stopped producing unscheduled contact, the exact thing adda guarantees by design.

The lived version of that statistic shows up clearly in local reporting. Laura Wright, a University of Saskatchewan sociology professor, put the structural problem in plain terms: "It's markedly more difficult to make friends as an adult than as a child," partly because modern life scatters people "across the country or communities" rather than keeping them in one place long enough for friendship to form passively (amp.cbc.ca). Saskatoon's Kristen MacLean solved it by joining 17 separate meetup groups; Whitney Matthews said it took three years to work up the nerve to join one. For newcomers specifically, the stakes are higher: Jing Zhu, who arrived in Windsor in 2021, called her first winter "the loneliest" of her life, while settlement worker Zakieh Zarabi, who runs the YMCA's newcomer connections program, says friendship isn't a nice-to-have for new arrivals but the actual mechanism through which people become established at all.

The Reckoning

Hofstede's framework draws a clean line here: Bangladesh scores 20 on individualism against Canada's 80, one of the widest gaps the index measures for any pairing in this series. That 60-point gulf is, almost exactly, the gap between a culture where relationship-building is ambient — built into tea stalls, verandas, and village ties that persist even after you move away — and one where it has become a deliberate, scheduled, occasionally effortful project that sociologists now study and newspapers now report on.

Neither system is purely better. Bangladesh's ambient model produces deep, low-effort social density, but it's also unevenly distributed: urbanization is shrinking the physical spaces that make it work, and the obligations that come bundled with those ties aren't optional. Canada's deliberate model produces real agency — you can choose your people rather than inherit them — but it has a documented failure mode: StatCan's own research found immigrants report higher loneliness than the general population, and "the general population" is already, by its own measure, lonelier than it was a generation ago.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Expat.com forum, Toronto thread — A.21may, a Bangladeshi expat, said their existing Bangladeshi friends in the city "are too busy to have social lives," which is why they went looking for other expats instead — a small but telling crack in the assumption that a shared diaspora automatically means an active social circle.

Expat.com forum, Toronto thread — Debzani, posting after roughly nine years in Toronto, was still asking whether anyone had found a local Bangladeshi community group — a reminder that "the community exists somewhere" and "the community is easy to find" are two very different claims.

Expat.com forum, Toronto thread — James replied that Toronto has no single unified expat social group at all, and pointed instead toward ethnic community associations and platforms like InterNations and Meetup as the practical workaround.

CBC News (Windsor) — Jing Zhu, an international student who arrived during pandemic border restrictions, called her first Canadian winter, spent apart from her husband for over three years, "the loneliest winter of my life."

CBC News (Windsor) — Angelica Belano, who moved from Brunei as a teenager, said making her first friend changed everything: "Feeling like I belong to an actual friend group made me feel like … I actually have potential to make friends here."

A note on sourcing: genuine, fetchable Reddit and Quora content specific to this pairing was not available despite repeated searches. A real expat.com forum thread specific to Bangladeshi social life in Toronto was used instead, alongside named CBC and academic sources, rather than any invented Reddit or Quora quote.

Conclusion

If you're moving from Dhaka to Toronto, the honest warning isn't about the cold — it's that nobody is going to organize a tea stall for you, and you'll need to do deliberately what used to happen on its own. If you're moving the other direction, the honest warning is different: the ambient warmth is real, but so are the obligations that come with it, and "everyone is included" can mean both more connection and less personal space than you're used to negotiating. The thing I'd tell a friend either way: figure out which kind of loneliness you're more willing to risk — the kind that comes from a culture that hasn't built the infrastructure for casual contact, or the kind that comes from a culture whose infrastructure assumes you already have more family nearby than you actually do.