How do you meet new friends?

[Notdotty]

We live in a village which we moved to a couple of years ago. I find the people who live in the actual village quite cliquey and hard to ever really get to know. Also, their main source of entertainment seems to centre around the pub (where the owner is a utter prat and obviously doesn't think I'm cool enough to even be in his shitty little pub).

I'm going a bit mad having hardly any decent friends (I mean, I know people but don't really count them as proper friends if you know what I mean). I'm in my early thirties - I need to meet some more similarly aged people! I have two primary school aged children and I feel like a teenage mother at school! I actually don't care too much about age - it's just people here seem very set in their ways and just not me. I'm a polite, kind and outgoing person - but not someone who enjoys shouting in a pub.

Any suggestions for things I could do to meet new people? No meet up groups where I live (unless I want to become a lesbian). Would love to hear how other people who have moved to a new area made friends - not at school!

Thanks

[LadyAntonella]

I don't know if I can advise but I can completely sympathise OP. I do sense unfriendliness if not necessarily hostility from parents (ok mums) at toddler groups etc. I don't know if it's coincidence but I am usually the youngest parent there by a long enough way that I have noticed it iyswim. Though, I am not a 'young mum' at all - I'm 32. I sometimes wonder if it's my age which makes it harder to break through some of the cliquiness, but don't see why it would be.

DH and I have had to move around a lot and find the rural town we live in now so much harder in terms of making friends than being in big cities. It's strange as I (foolishly) expected the opposite to be true! The one way I have found that we are just starting to make friends is actually through the street we live in. Do you have neighbours you get on with? I'm not saying any of mine are my best mates but I have definitely found them more fun to be with and friendlier than the mums I meet out with DD. Again I would have expected the opposite!

Oh well, we have only been here a year. Maybe need to give it some time.

Do you work op? I'm guessing not as you are posting in SAHP! . DD is starting nursery soon, so I will be trying to find a new job. I'm hopeful this will help a little bit. I hope it will be good for DD to see other children on a regular basis without me there.