Living abroad
You live with a family. You eat with them, you look after their children, you're in their home every day. And yet you're alone — in a way that's hard to explain until you've felt it.
The au pair position creates a unique social ambiguity. You're not an employee with professional colleagues. You're not a guest. You're not a family member. You occupy a category without a clear social script, and that ambiguity can make the household itself a lonely place. You're present but not quite belonging. You're included in the logistics of the family but not in the intimacy.
Then when the family's day ends and everyone retreats to their own life, you're alone in your room in a foreign country. Your social world back home is continuing without you. Your social world here barely exists yet.
Most au pairs arrive with an expectation that the family will provide some of the social scaffolding. Sometimes they do. More often, building an actual social life requires work that no one prepared you for: finding other au pairs, navigating a foreign city, making friends in a language you don't fully speak. The language school can help. Local au pair networks can help. But in the weeks before any of that develops, the loneliness can be acute.
Mindfuse offers anonymous voice calls with real people — no profile, no social complexity, just a genuine conversation. First one free, €4/month on iOS and Android. For the evenings when the room goes quiet and you need to hear a voice that isn't coming from the television.
Anonymous voice calls with real strangers. No social complexity, just human connection.
One free conversation · €4/month · iOS and Android