Imaginary friends: migrants' emotional accounts about friends outside Australia

Abstract

Migration can have emotional costs for migrants, whose face‐to‐face friendships are ruptured. This article explores the ways that migrants managed their emotions towards old friends after migration. Excerpts from semi‐structured interviews with 20 skilled migrants are analysed to show the stoic, fantasy and disengagement accounts used to deal with ruptured relationships. Each account demonstrates a different type of emotion work, which assisted migrants to cope with the loss of friends. The article discusses how the ways that migrants thought about their friends were affected by structural aspects such as geographic and temporal distance, and normative expectations such as the obligation for the migrant to return home. The article provides insight into the personal costs of migration and highlights the loss and coping that can follow, whilst demonstrating the complexity of friendship over time and geographic distance.

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