The In-Group and the Pub Quiz: Making Actual Friends in South Korea and the UK

🇰🇷 South Korea · 🇬🇧 UK

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Britons report an average of 2.6 best friends, the lowest figure in one multi-country Snapchat study and comfortably below the global average of 4.3 — a statistic every expat in London eventually feels in their bones on a rainy Sunday. Koreans, meanwhile, maintain in-groups so durable that school classmates from decades past outrank most subsequent acquaintances, and admission for newcomers runs through a concept — jeong — that has no English translation and no fast track. Both countries are, by expat consensus, hard to befriend; InterNations' Expat Insider surveys rank the UK persistently low on "Finding Friends," and Korea forums are a genre literature of almost-friendships. The difference is the shape of the wall: in Korea it surrounds the group, in Britain it surrounds each individual politely.

[IMAGE_1]

Do's & Don'ts

🇰🇷 South Korea

🇬🇧 UK

🇰🇷 South Korea: The Long Road Into the Circle

Korean social life is organised around in-groups with histories: school cohorts, university classes, military service mates, hometown networks, workplace teams. Scholarship on jeong — the accumulated, obligation-rich affection that binds Korean relationships — describes something closer to kinship than Western friendship: it grows slowly, through shared meals, favours, crises, and time, and once established it is nearly indestructible. The practical consequence for newcomers is a two-speed experience. Surface hospitality is instant — colleagues will feed you, help you move flats, and worry about your health with startling sincerity. Membership is slow: cross-cultural researchers estimate the acquaintance-to-friend transition takes materially longer than the Western benchmark unless accelerated by intensive shared activity, which is precisely what Korea's club culture, group trips, and long alcoholic evenings are for.

The failure mode expats describe is the "pet foreigner" plateau: welcomed everywhere, included in nothing structural, valued as novelty or free English practice. The exits from the plateau are consistent across every account — learn the language past pleasantries, join something with mandatory recurrence, accept the age-based relational grammar rather than fighting it, and let obligations accumulate. In a culture where Hofstede Insights scores individualism at just 18, the unit of friendship is the group, and the group must watch you show up.

🇬🇧 UK: The Fortress of Politeness

Britain presents the opposite topology: no gatekept in-groups, just forty million individually sealed units exchanging pleasantries. The statistics are quietly bleak — 85% of UK adults report experiencing loneliness in the past year in one national survey, and the 2.6-best-friends figure suggests the famous reserve is not a myth but a lifestyle. British friend groups calcify early, often at school or university, and while everyone is welcoming at the surface layer — the pub, the office kitchen, the touchline — the core group operates a de facto waiting list measured in years.

The saving institution is the pub, which functions as Korea's group activities do: a structured, recurring, alcohol-lubricated context where intimacy can accrue without ever being named. The rules reward patience and form. Regularity beats charisma — the person seen every Thursday becomes a friend by erosion. The round system builds reciprocal obligation one pint at a time, a micro-jeong the British would be horrified to hear described that way. And shoulder-to-shoulder formats — quiz teams, five-a-side, parkrun, allotments — outperform face-to-face socialising, because British intimacy prefers an alibi: we are not bonding, we are merely doing the quiz.

The Reckoning

The two systems fail newcomers in mirror-image ways. Korea offers warmth without membership: you will be fed, toasted, and cared for years before you are structurally included. Britain offers membership without warmth: you can join the quiz team in week one and still know nothing about your teammates' inner lives at year three. The convergence is more interesting — both cultures build friendship through repeated, structured, slightly alcoholic co-presence rather than through the American-style fast intimacy of confessional coffee dates. And both reward the same strategy: pick recurring institutions, attend relentlessly, and let time do what charm cannot. The expat who rotates through novel social events in either country collects acquaintances; the one who goes to the same mountain club or the same pub every week collects, eventually, a life.

[IMAGE_2]

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — In a widely-answered thread on why foreigners struggle to make friends in Korea, Korean respondents were disarmingly frank: their closest circles formed decades ago at school, their calendars belong to those circles, and the foreigner is competing not against unfriendliness but against a fully-booked heart.

r/korea — Long-term expats describe the "pet foreigner" arc as a rite of passage: one poster reported three years of constant dinner invitations that never became friendship until he joined a hiking club, climbed with the same ajusshis every Sunday for a year, and was one day informed — not asked — that he was coming on the group's Jeju trip.

Internations — The UK's persistently weak "Finding Friends" ranking in the Expat Insider survey comes with a recurring commentary theme: expats report British colleagues who are funny, kind, and warm for eight hours a day, then vanish into lives that have had no vacancies since approximately 2009.

r/AskUK — Asked how adults actually make friends, British posters converge on one answer with unnerving consistency: you don't, unless something recurring forces it — and the most-upvoted practical advice is almost always the same: same pub, same night, every week, and in eighteen months you'll have a funeral-worthy friend without either of you ever acknowledging it.

Conclusion

The strategy is identical in both countries; only the venue changes. Choose one or two recurring, structured activities — in Korea, a club with a group identity and meals attached; in Britain, a pub night or team with a fixed weekly slot — and attend with the discipline of a mortgage payment. In Korea, invest in the language and accept the group's rhythms, including the drinking and the age grammar. In Britain, respect the pace: warmth arrives disguised as banter, and the invitation to something real may take a year and will be phrased as if it doesn't matter.

What I'd tell a friend over a drink: Korea makes you wait outside a warm house, and Britain hands you a key to a cold one — either way, keep showing up until the temperature changes.