Forging new friendships one step at a time

What compels a person to leave a warm bed to walk for hours with people they barely know? Allow Portia Jones to explain....

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IT'S 10am on a Sunday and instead of waking to a skull-splitting hangover, I'm dressed in multiple layers about to start a coastal hike with total strangers. 19-year-old me is deeply unimpressed.

As the sea breeze whips around the cliffs, the obvious question is what makes a person leave a cosy bed to walk with people they've never met before? Which exact life choices funnelled you here?

I could offer some wellness guff about mental clarity, fresh air, and escaping the tyranny of emails. I won't because it isn't the whole truth.

The real reason is everyone is typically "so, so busy", or "way too tired, babe", or only available once every other harvest moon, to hang out any more.

At this elder millennial stage of life, most adults exist in a permanent state of low-grade exhaustion worn down by the school run, long working hours, and weekends spent at soft play making polite conversation with other parents they secretly loathe.

Meanwhile, as someone living in a state of perpetual arrested development, I still want to do things at the weekend.

There are coastlines I yearn to explore, mountains I want to climb, new hobbies I want to try, and films I'm desperate to see on a big screen. Hello Doomsday 2026.

So the choice becomes simple. Do everything alone or seek out new connections. The latter sounds vaguely terrifying as an adult but marginally less bleak than spending another Sunday doom-scrolling on the sofa.

It's the desire to connect which has compelled me to join several social groups in the last year. From hiking to paddleboarding, swimming, and creative writing collectives, I've thrown myself in with gusto, hoping for new experiences and even the hope of meeting interesting people.

I won't lie - even for a former theatre kid like me, the first time I went to a "hiking social" was a little daunting.