Love Leiden

Cultural differences

I took a step forward the other day in my understanding of the differences between Dutch people and English people.  One I had already noticed for some time, the other has been becoming clearer until I solidified it recently.

Firstly, Dutch people are definitely not good at apologizing.  There are three ways of saying sorry in Dutch: sorry, het spijt me, and neem me niet kwalijk.  However, the Dutch really do not like to use them!

If you bump into someone the rule is that you must try as hard as possible to ignore the other person so that you don’t have to acknowledge that you have made a mistake.  If you upset someone, then use the same tactic, etc.  Sounds harsh, but this has been a continued observation.

Secondly, Dutch people have a very different view of friends and acquaintances than British people.  I reckon that everyone has a kind of system of circles.  Maybe there is a psychological or anthropological word for it.  Dutch people have distinct circles, roughly in the following order of intimacy:

the family circle
the circle of friends
the circle of work colleagues
the circle of neighbours
the circles of acquaintances (from church, sports clubs, school, etc.)

British people have similar circles, however the main difference is that Dutch people rarely let these circles overlap.  If you’re a work colleague then you wouldn’t tend to get invited back to someone else’s house because that would bump you into a more intimate circle than is fitting for ‘work colleague’ status.  I once heard that a British person who had been working with a colleague for two years finally asked him to come for dinner one evening.  This certainly happens with close colleagues in Britain, but the surprised Dutch colleague replied, “No thanks, I don’t want any more friends.”   This clearly put the workmates in a category of colleagues rather than friends.  Why?  Because colleagues are not friends, those are two distinct circles here.

The puzzling question for me is how do you ever get promoted from an acquaintance level circle to a friend level?  We have been living here for nearly three years now and have found it very difficult to get promoted from acquaintance to friend (i.e. make friends!).  Initially Dutch people seem very friendly.  I think this is linked to one of their favourite words, nieuwsgierig, which means curious.  Dutch people love to know who everyone is, to be in possession of some basic details about everyone.  This info is usually elicited through a friendly introduction chat.  You then become acquaintances.

However, a major difference between Dutch and British people is the thickness of the skin of the circle.  It seems that British people accept new people into a friend circle more easily than Dutch people.  Maybe British people have a more ‘centred set’ system and Dutch a more ‘bounded set’.  In simple terms, in the British system it’s easy to be classed as a friend but everyone knows how near or far away from the intimate centre you are.  This suits the polite British who would hate to reject someone, but not necessarily allow all the privileges of intimacy.  In the Dutch system you’re either in or out.  This suits the Dutch sense of clarity, which often is experienced as bluntness to foreigners.

So there you have it.  Whilst I still regard the Dutch and British cultures to be two of the closest in Europe, there are often huge differences which are really hard to navigate as an incomer.

If anyone has tips on how to become friends with Dutch people then please let me know!  I suspect that coffee plays a crucial role though…