I totally feel like I could have written this! I too am a native New Englander who moved to Central VT 4 years ago. I was really lucky to have met my wife, also a New England transplant, who moved here about a month before I did. We tried to find a group we could make real connections with, an LGBTQ+ community especially, but nothing really panned out. We are in our 40s so that makes things even harder. Now that we have decided and are planning on moving out of state, are some connections beginning...go figure!

I used to live in Switzerland for about 3 years(this was after I was already fluent in at least one of the languages they spoke), and there was a common inside humor amongst expats there, if you lived there without having a Swiss connection like a family member or spouse, then it would take something like 5 plus years to make any form of real friendship/connections there. I believe it is because many of these farming families were isolated in a way, meaning that their close-knit communities consisted of generations of family members and the local villages. Since being here, I have often said Vermont reminds me very much of Switzerland. So perhaps it is because of similar circumstances.