The author and her husband moved to a small town six months ago and made friends easily.
Courtesy of Tayla Blaire
Six months ago, my husband and I uprooted our lives, moving to a little town on the coast and away from the metropolis of Johannesburg, where I spent the last 32 years. Hermanus, South Africa (my new home) is small — a population of 100,000, compared to Johannesburg's 6 million.In Joburg, we had plenty of friends. In our new town, we had no one. Not a single familiar face. I braced for the worst, anticipating aching loneliness and sparking conversations with the rock hyraxes that frequent the coastal path shrubbery. Instead, we found the mythical 'village' that everyone harps on about.Making friends in your mid-30s is always spoken about with emphasis on how tough it is, but honestly, it's been laughably easy for us. My mom can't keep up with all the new names I drop on our phone calls. At a recent birthday celebration (for our pharmacist, whom we befriended), we realized we were surrounded by 16 people we'd call our friends, none of whom we'd known six months ago. Here's what we did to start a circle from scratch.We say 'yes' to new thingsOur theme for this year is 'Yes, and' — like the improv comedy phrase. We pledged that in 2026, we would say yes to as much as possible, and then go even further. "Are you guys keen to come camping?" The 2025 version of us would say camping isn't really our vibe. The 2026 version of us says, "Yes, and we're bringing everything we need for s'mores."We take our friends' dogs for walks. We go camping by dams or hiking in the nearby Kogelberg mountains. Over the summer months (December to February, here), our friends met for beach evenings, taking turns to buy a heap of fried fish and chips, cracking open cold bottles after dips in even colder tidal pools. Here, an impromptu wine tasting is always well-attended, as is a games night. If I schedule some scuba diving in our kelp forests, at least one of them is happy to tag along.
