Were we too open? What Korea taught us about friendship

Raised by a Korean family in Brazil, we have had our share of surprises and letdowns when visiting Korea. Of course, every society has its own norms, and adjusting to a different way of life is one thing. Building personal relationships, however, means navigating a whole new set of social dynamics and expectations, which we are still learning to do.

Recently, we’ve come across several Instagram Reels and YouTube videos discussing the difficulties of building close friendships with Koreans, with many creators saying they only have a small number of close Korean friends. Discussions on Reddit suggest that developing a genuine friendship can take a year or even longer. Across these conversations, one theme comes up repeatedly: Building meaningful relationships takes time, patience and consistency.

Living in Korea, we have also come to realize that Korean society is very high-context. There are many unspoken social rules and nuances that Koreans absorb from an early age, often through experience rather than explicit instruction. For us, this realization has been particularly interesting and at times confusing. Although we are both Korean, we grew up in Brazil, which meant that many of these social rules were not things we naturally absorbed as children. In some situations, we found ourselves being seen as Korean while internally feeling just as unfamiliar with certain expectations as someone coming from an entirely different cultural background. For someone coming from such a different environment, understanding these rules can take time — and even after learning them, navigating personal relationships within those dynamics can still be challenging.

This created a particular kind of cultural duality for us. Korea was never entirely foreign, but neither did it always feel completely familiar. We had a connection to the language, the food and the culture, but we had not necessarily grown up learning how to navigate every social expectation that came with being Korean.

Initially, we never thought that openly sharing personal information or speaking freely about how we feel could be perceived as a weakness or make people uncomfortable. Because these habits felt so natural to us, it took some time to realize that what we considered warmth or sincerity could be interpreted very differently.

Growing up in Brazil, we were accustomed to relationships becoming closer through conversation. Sharing personal stories, talking about family problems, expressing emotions or even admitting that we were having a difficult day could be part of getting to know someone. These were not necessarily signs that a relationship was already deeply intimate — sometimes they were simply part of the process of becoming closer. In Korea, however, we began to realize that the same openness could sometimes feel premature or even uncomfortable for the other person.

Most times this difference was particularly difficult to recognize because we did not immediately think of ourselves as outsiders to Korean culture. After all, we are Korean. However, being Korean and growing up in Korea turned out to be two vastly different experiences.

What initially felt like emotional distance may actually have been a different understanding of boundaries. In Korea, intimacy often seems to develop gradually. People may first establish familiarity through shared activities, routines, school, work or mutual friends before revealing more personal parts of themselves.

We have been trying to build closeness by opening up, while others might have been trying to build closeness simply by spending time together. Realizing this helped us reconsider some of our earlier experiences. What we had sometimes perceived as distance or a lack of interest may simply have been a different way of allowing a relationship to develop.

This is where the idea of Korea as a high-context society began to make more sense to us. Much of what needs to be communicated does not necessarily need to be said. Tone, timing, relationships, hierarchy and even what is left unsaid can carry meaning. For those who grew up in the culture, many of these signals may feel intuitive but for us they were sometimes things we had to learn to notice.

For someone accustomed to expressing things directly, this can be confusing — perhaps even more so when people assume that you already understand the rules because of how you look, your nationality or your Korean name. You may wonder whether someone is genuinely interested in becoming friends, simply being polite or quietly signaling that a certain boundary should not be crossed.

Perhaps the hardest part was realizing that our openness, which we have always considered a strength, could be interpreted differently. It was not that we suddenly believed our way of connecting with people was wrong — rather, we began to understand that sincerity itself can be expressed in multiple ways.

We had assumed that being honest about our feelings would make relationships more genuine. Instead, we sometimes found ourselves wondering whether we had shared too much, too soon. There were moments when we became more aware of ourselves in conversations, questioning whether something that would have felt completely natural in Brazil might feel unusually personal in Korea.

But over time, we began to question whether the problem was really that Korean people were difficult to get close to. Perhaps we had been measuring closeness according to the rules we had grown up with. Perhaps our own cultural background had given us a particular definition of what friendship was supposed to look like and we were unconsciously expecting relationships in Korea to follow the same path.

In one culture, friendship may be built through disclosure. In another, it may be built through consistency — showing up, sharing meals, helping each other, remembering small details or simply spending time together. Growing up between cultures had not simply left us unfamiliar with certain Korean social rules, it had also given us a different perspective from which to question the assumptions we had brought with us.

Perhaps the challenge isn't learning how to make Korean friends, but learning to recognize friendship when it doesn't look like the friendships we grew up with. For us, that has also meant accepting that being Korean does not necessarily mean experiencing Korean culture in the same way as someone who grew up here. Our connection to Korea is real, but so is the influence of the country where we were raised. Navigating that space between familiarity and unfamiliarity has sometimes been challenging, but it has also helped us understand that cultural identity does not always fit neatly into a single category.

Chyung Eun-ju (ejchyung@snu.ac.kr) is a tech research associate at Donghyun ASP. She earned both her bachelor's in business and master's in marketing from Seoul National University. Joel Cho (joelywcho@gmail.com) is a practicing lawyer specializing in intellectual property and digital law.