True even when you don’t rent. I live on a street of pretty Victorian-style houses with those big old fashioned front porches. One imagines sitting on the porch in the evening as your neighbors take their evening walks, and everyone smiles and nods at each other and occasionally you have an impromptu chat.
If neighborhoods were ever like that, it was probably in the 1950s and 60s and at the expense of inclusiveness.
In practice any porch furniture is just visual props that never get used, I don’t know 75% of my neighbors by name much less personally, in fact I seldom ever SEE them. And everyone is exhausted from work and if they are out it is to just walk the damned dog so they can get to bed or veg out in front of the TV to unwind. They are apt to be jacked into air pods if they are younger too, lost in their own bubble of gossip or podcasts or music or whatever.
Social connections don’t happen much in neighborhoods anymore, they happen at work, professional orgs, community groups like seniors have, and yes, churches.
I am an officer in our HOA (non-gated community of modest homes but we have to maintain our own street) and we can’t even get up a quorum of members to vote on anything. We run the place by fiat basically because no one cares to be involved. People get stuck on the board for a decade at a time because no one wants to replace them.
There’s one guy in the 'hood who invites everyone to an informal pot luck in our little playground area, including people both in and adjacent to our HOA, and that is the ONLY successful neighborhood glue that we have. There’s someone else who fantasizes about starting a book club within the HOA but there are already a half dozen of those in our city and anyone who is interested in that sort of thing already goes to one of them.
I don’t claim to have an answer. We have been liking the people we meet at a Tai Chi class, they are very low key and friendly and we have some contact with people without a lot of complexity or expectations. That is getting to be about our speed these days anyway. And it’s about as close as we’ve gotten to something somewhat religious in origin that we don’t really buy into but there’s a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
Some of the liberal Christians aren’t too bad, are not bigots, or homophobes or transphobes or whatever. But there’s still a lot of ritual or other cruft to put up with. Tai Chi is really just about gentle exercise and stretching in a disciplined way with group reinforcement, and you don’t have to listen to too much of their nattering about “ground force” and whatnot. You can get serious and go to week-long “intensives” but that vast majority don’t. You can come and go to different classes on different days and no one hassles you about it. So it works for us as an excuse to get out together a couple hours a week and stretch our old bones.
I hope you find the connections you need and want. It isn’t always easy.
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. I am sorry to hear of your struggle to find a partner. Don’t give up.