Making friends in Dubai when you work from home

Picture Sam, a freelance designer in a one-bedroom flat in JVC. It is Wednesday, a little after one. She has been at the laptop since eight, answered forty messages, sat through two video calls with clients in other time zones, and has not said a single word out loud to another person in the same room. Then the buzzer goes. The delivery rider hands over her lunch, says "Enjoy, madam", and she says "Thank you, have a good day", and that is it. That is the conversation.

She notices, standing in the doorway, that it was the only one yesterday too.

Sam is invented, but you may recognise her. Dubai has a large and growing number of people who work from home: freelancers on a freelance permit, remote employees of companies in London or Bangalore, founders running something from the kitchen table, people on a remote work visa who chose the sunshine and brought the job with them. A surprising number of them go whole weeks without a proper conversation.

What the office was quietly doing for you

Nobody misses the commute or the fluorescent lighting. What people miss, often without being able to name it, is everything that happened at the edges of the working day. The chat at the coffee machine. Someone putting their head round the door to ask about the weekend. The lunch that happened because three of you were hungry at the same time.

None of that was planned, which is exactly why it mattered. The sociologist Rebecca Adams describes three conditions that friendships have always needed: being physically near each other, repeated interaction that nobody has to organise, and a setting relaxed enough to let people open up a little. An office, for all its faults, supplies the first two for free and occasionally the third. You did not have to be brave. You just had to turn up, and the friendships formed around you like weather.

Working from home removes all three at once. There is no one nearby, nothing repeats unless you arrange it, and the only relaxed setting is your own sofa. The machine that used to make friends for you has been switched off, and nobody sent a memo.

Why it creeps up on you

The odd thing is how long it takes to notice. The first months of working from home usually feel wonderful: no traffic on Sheikh Zayed Road, lunch in your own kitchen, a morning swim instead of a meeting. Your phone is full of messages. It feels like contact.

It is not quite. Messages and video calls keep existing relationships ticking over, but they are poor at building new ones. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar has shown that friendships decay without contact, and that the closer the friendship, the more face-to-face time it needs to stay close. A year of remote work in a city where you arrived knowing nobody can leave you with a busy inbox and no one to call when the car breaks down. If that sounds familiar, we have written more gently about feeling lonely in Dubai, and it is more common than anyone lets on.

Build your own office

The fix is not to go back to an office. It is to rebuild, on purpose, the parts of office life that made friends: the same place, the same faces, on the same days.

Start with a place. Pick one co-working space or one café and go on fixed days, say Tuesday and Thursday, every week. Dubai has plenty of both, from the co-working floors around Dubai Internet City and Business Bay to the quieter cafés in Al Quoz and the neighbourhood spots in Jumeirah. The public libraries, including the Mohammed bin Rashid Library by the Creek, have good desks and a calm crowd. What matters is not which one. It is that you go to the same one, on the same days, at roughly the same time.

Ray Oldenburg called places like this third places: not home, not work, but somewhere you can turn up alone and slowly become known. For a remote worker the category blurs, because the café is also your work, but the principle holds. Week one, you are a stranger with a laptop. Week three, the barista starts your order when you walk in. Week six, the man at the next table who is always on calls with Germany says, "Same time as usual?" and you have the beginnings of a colleague you never had to be hired alongside.

The lunchtime walk and the weekly class

Then add two small fixtures to the week.

The first is a lunchtime walk. In the cooler months, from October to April, a thirty-minute loop at midday is one of the nicest things about working for yourself in Dubai. Do it at the same time and on the same route, whether that is a park near home, the Creek, or a stretch of beach. Invite someone once you know a few faces. A walk is easier than coffee for a first meeting, because you are side by side, there is always something to look at, and it ends by itself when your next call starts.

The second is a weekly class. A language, pottery, climbing, a coding course, life drawing, anything that meets on the same evening for six or eight weeks with the same group. The class gives you a reason to be there and a task to be bad at together, which takes all the pressure off the talking.

Three fixed points, then: the place, the walk and the class. That is a small office's worth of repeated faces, and it costs a few hours a week that you were probably spending alone anyway.

Use the freedom other people do not have

Here is the part remote workers tend to forget. You have something most people in this city would envy: your daytime.

Your friends in offices can only meet on weekday evenings and at weekends, which is when everything is busy, the traffic is at its worst and every café is full. You can have breakfast at ten on a Tuesday. You can go to an exhibition at Alserkal Avenue at eleven in the morning when the galleries are empty. You can meet someone for a long lunch in Al Fahidi, take a mid-afternoon swim at Kite Beach, or join a group that does things while the rest of the city is at its desk.

That is a real advantage, and it is worth finding other people who share it. Other freelancers, other remote workers, shift workers with days off, parents whose children are at school, people between jobs. There are more of them than you would guess.

Structure beats spontaneity

The instinct of most people who work from home is to keep things loose. You are free, after all, so why fix anything? You will see people when you feel like it.

The trouble is that "when I feel like it" almost never arrives. Some weeks the work piles up, some weeks you are tired, and every plan that has to be decided afresh loses to a deadline. Spontaneity works when there are people around you by default, as there were in an office or at university. When there is no default, spontaneity mostly means staying home.

Structure does the opposite. A standing Tuesday at the co-working space, a walk every Thursday at one, a class on Monday evenings: none of them need a decision, so none of them lose to a busy week. And friendship, as Jeffrey Hall's research at the University of Kansas suggests, runs on hours together, something like 50 to reach casual friendship and many more for a close one. Hours only add up when things repeat. The dullest calendar in the world is often the one that makes the most friends.

From familiar face to actual friend

Eventually the place, the walk and the class will give you a handful of people you see often and like. Then somebody has to take a small step: suggest a coffee that is not at the usual table, a lunch on a different day, a Saturday plan. It is usually a little awkward and nearly always welcome. Remote workers have one more advantage here, because "I'm free at lunch on Wednesday, want to try that place round the corner?" is a much easier invitation to accept than another evening out. There is more on that step in how acquaintances become friends.

And be kind to the delivery rider. It is not his job to be your social life, but he may be the first to notice when you are out more.

Where TruFriend fits

TruFriend is built for exactly this kind of week. Tru, our assistant, learns what you enjoy, when you are actually free (including weekday daytimes, if that is your advantage) and how far you will travel, then introduces a few people nearby who fit, with the reasons you might get on. A conversation opens only when you both say yes.

Circles supply the repeating faces an office used to. There are small groups around one interest, such as AI and tech, coffee and conversation and language exchange, each with a quick question every week. Any member can start a plan with a day, a time, a public place and a number of spaces, so a Tuesday co-working morning or a lunchtime walk can become something others join. And when a deadline finishes early, "Free today" lets your circle know you are around at short notice.

Friendship only, for grown-ups aged 18 and over, and free for founding members. Join TruFriend: it takes a minute.

Don’t just read about it

Join a circle of people in Dubai who enjoy the same things. Members already on TruFriend can join from the app or suggest a plan in any chat.