Personal Space and Boundaries: Making Friends in the USA
Personal Space and Boundaries; making friends in USA
Most of the foreign students who come to the United States to study find out that the concept of friendship is not what they know, or not what they have been brought up to believe. They believe that Americans seem very friendly at in the beginning stage of friendship and then they sort o disappear. In my culture, people who don’t know each other don’t say “Hello, how are you etc.” to people they don’t know or they don’t get into conversation about the weather, or any other general topic with complete strangers. People only do these things with people that they know. That is why it is very surprising to foreign students when everybody on the streets smiles at him/her and try to make conversations with him/her. They often feel like saying “Do I know you?” or “ Have we met before?” , but they cannot do this as the American approaching them seem very friendly and so they answer in the same way, thinking that they will have lots of friends in this country. They misinterpret American friendliness as an offer for the friendship. However, when they are so happy that they have made a friend, all of a sudden a great disappointment sets in when they see him/her no more. They act like they are best friends, and the next time they run into each other sometimes the American does not even say “hello”, because she/he does not feel like it. While a foreign student might think of Americans as “superficial”, Americans in return may think of them as being cold, emotionally distant, and difficult to make friends with. We must accept that all of these difference rise from the nature of our country, what we understand from the term “friend”, how we are brought up, what we understand from personal space or personal boundaries, and our expectations from our friends. Firstly, let’s take the nature of our country: I mean in the Middle East or Europe people usually stay in the same place where they were born, find jobs, get
Most of the foreign students who come to the United States to study find out that the concept of friendship is not what they know, or not what they have been brought up to believe. They believe that Americans seem very friendly at in the beginning stage of friendship and then they sort o disappear. In my culture, people who don’t know each other don’t say “Hello, how are you etc.” to people they don’t know or they don’t get into conversation about the weather, or any other general topic with complete strangers. People only do these things with people that they know. That is why it is very surprising to foreign students when everybody on the streets smiles at him/her and try to make conversations with him/her. They often feel like saying “Do I know you?” or “ Have we met before?” , but they cannot do this as the American approaching them seem very friendly and so they answer in the same way, thinking that they will have lots of friends in this country. They misinterpret American friendliness as an offer for the friendship. However, when they are so happy that they have made a friend, all of a sudden a great disappointment sets in when they see him/her no more. They act like they are best friends, and the next time they run into each other sometimes the American does not even say “hello”, because she/he does not feel like it. While a foreign student might think of Americans as “superficial”, Americans in return may think of them as being cold, emotionally distant, and difficult to make friends with. We must accept that all of these difference rise from the nature of our country, what we understand from the term “friend”, how we are brought up, what we understand from personal space or personal boundaries, and our expectations from our friends. Firstly, let’s take the nature of our country: I mean in the Middle East or Europe people usually stay in the same place where they were born, find jobs, get