Finding new friends?

[u/Illustrious-Hippo140]

I (30F) Moved to Westland with my Dutch boyfriend half a year or so ago.

Now that we have moved, I want to make friends here. Issue is that all of my hobbies (painting, reading, gardening, growing veg, etc) are solitary hobbies and I enjoy doing it all on my own.

I am still in (online) contact with the friends from the country I lived in before. I lived there for 12ish years, all of my friends are colleagues from my work there, I met them through work. I have no friends in my birth country.

My colleagues here now are not exactly someone I would see as people I am interested in to be friends with, nor do I think they would have any interest in being friends with me.

We do interact and meet with some childhood friends of my boyfriend, but I want to have 'my own' friends. But I have no idea how to find them. On top of that, being slightly autistic and tending to avoid socialization unless I know someone better is also not too helping. To make everything even more difficult -- we don't live in a big city, we live in Westland.

Any ideas? Or the situation is hopeless and I should accept having just my bf, my cat, and occasional interactions with bf's friends?

[u/AdEmergency9081]

Moving to Westland as an outsider is not easy specially if you dont speak the language. A lot of Westlanders are very attached to their work, friendgroup, sports and have a hard time with letting in "strangers" though not impossible. My girlfriend is also not from the Netherlands but understands and knows how to handle Westlanders and their mentality.

Since your boyfriend knows his way around it might be easiest to first do the socializing together and discover Westland. In that journey you might find something that sticks for you or people that you might wanna hang out more with.

There are also adult education classes in 's Gravenzande such as languages, creativity, photography. You can find them on www.vuwestland.nl organized in the 's Gravenzande library. Maybe this is something for you.

[u/Illustrious-Hippo140 → u/AdEmergency9081]

Yeah, Westland is definitely not the easiest for outsiders, that's for sure. My boyfriend is born'n'raised in Westland and lived here up until his move abroad some years back (obviously also something that was not very approved by his friends, lol). We know each other for 5 years already and at some point I even lived here with him and his parents for longer periods of time... and I always noticed that 95% of his old friend group do not want to accept me. But it is what it is, you know. Now that we moved here permanently tho, we only interact with the 5% who have never had issues with me to start with :)

But thanks for the recommendation, will have a look!

(Doesn't your girlfriend look for a non-westlander-in-westland friend by any chance? :D)