In the playground, it was easy.
Growing up, making friends happened organically, as you went to school with a dozen or two like-minded peers who were navigating the same coming-of-age experiences as you: education, puberty, sexuality. Shared topics of conversation came easily, from the classes you shared or the school outings you went on. At primary school, party invitations would typically include everyone in the class ‘so no one feels left out’, while secondary school and universities offered fresh opportunities to find your tribe: after-hours clubs, sports teams, socials.
But, in adulthood, forming friendships is not as simple. To begin with, there is much less “incidental” contact with our peers. Gone are the days when you'd see your best friends at school, or live around the corner from them. Nowadays, it's typical for us to live far away from the friends we made at school, with work colleagues our only daily contact on weekdays (and, with the rise of work from home culture, often not even that).
Add to that the pressures of busy lives, clashing life stages, temporary or permanent relocations and the added strain of maintaining romantic relationships and/or childcare, and friendships can often fall to the wayside. Before you know it, you're lacking the baseline of friendship that you always took for granted at school – those people who understand you, lift you up and are navigating similar experiences to yours – leaving a gaping hole in our lives without you every realising it.
Thankfully, a new book – Platonic: How Understanding Your Attachment Style Can Help You Make and Keep Friends – seeks to change all that. This extract explores “propinquity”, otherwise known on the fact of being physically close to someone, and share how we can capitalise on the power of “locationship” in order to make new friends as an adult.
Mady Segal, a professor of sociology in the US, discovered the power of propinquity during a study that aimed to predict which police officers would become friends. She found that the secret to friendship was last names. Those cadets with last names that started with the same letter—say, Carlton and Cassidy— had a higher likelihood of becoming friends. It actually wasn’t about the last names, per se, but rather the implications of last names. Cadets were seated alphabetically, and Carltons and Cassidys were likely to sit next to each other. When each cadet was asked to nominate someone else in the academy as a close friend, a whopping 90 percent of cadets listed someone they sat beside.
Propinquity is proof that friendship isn’t magical. It’s overwhelmingly determined by the spaces we find or place ourselves in. If we’re lucky, our job, school, or hobbies will already provide us with ample propinquity with others we might get along with. If we’re not, then we’ll have to create our own. That means that if we stay at home all day and watch television, then we may only ever achieve propinquity with late-night talk shows. It doesn’t matter how many soul mate friends may be out there for us if we never achieve any sort of propinquity with any of them; they won’t slink their way into our lives like fruit flies do to fruits unless we invite them. When we regularly place ourselves in physical proximity with others we can connect to, we are writing our own fate, acknowledging that we have control over our friendships, and upping our chances of connection. One reason propinquity works so well is that it reduces the costs involved with seeing someone. When potential friends live far away, you have to go out of your way to get in your car or ride the bus to get to them, but when they’re already in your vicinity, seeing each other is easy. According to a small study conducted by Robert Hayes at the University of California, Los Angeles, when you’re building early relationships, costs diminish the likelihood of the relationship progressing. So, if you have to commute an hour to see each other, you may realise that even though you have a budding friendship, the commute isn’t worth the bud.
Later in the relationship, costs are way less correlated with sustaining the relationship, so people will make the commute for the connection, but they won’t just to figure out if they kinda maybe sorta will eventually become friends. That is why so many people have “locationships,” or low-cost friendships that are sustained because friends live in the same location. Returning to our networking event, even if you chatted briefly with that person who lives in your neighbourhood and forgot their name, they are someone to follow up with.
Another reason propinquity works is because if we know we might see someone again, we like them more. In an older study, conducted in the 1960s, women were presented with profiles of two women who were similar. They were told they’d be engaging in on- going discussion groups with the woman in one of the profiles. They reported liking the profile of the woman more whom they’d presumedly see again. When we know we’ll see someone again, we tend to be more invested.
One last reason why propinquity works is that we like people when we are exposed to them more and they become familiar to us. In the psychology world, this is called the “mere exposure effect,” since through merely being exposed to someone continuously, we come to like them. In a study conducted out of the University of Pittsburgh, an experimenter chose four strangers to show up at a large psychology lecture, for a varying number of classes. One stranger infiltrated fifteen classes, another ten, another five, and the last zero. The strangers didn’t interact with anyone in the class, and yet, students reported liking the most the stranger who showed up to the highest number of classes; this stranger was liked about 20 percent more than the stranger who never showed up to any. By and large, the students didn’t even recognise that any of the strangers came to their class, demonstrating that the mere exposure effect happens unconsciously.
Mere exposure means that the people who end up building relationships are those who establish the most face time with the people around them. That is why research in college dorms has found that people who live at the ends of the hall develop fewer friendships than those who live in the centre. Centrally located rooms offer face time with more of your fellow residents and the gift of mere exposure.
You can harness the mere exposure effect by joining a continuous social event rather than a one-off one; it’s choosing book clubs over happy hours, or a language class over a language workshop. Propinquity also tells us to befriend people we already see often, maybe our neighbours, or our co-workers, or someone who lives close by. You can also make both propinquity and mere exposure work in your favour by becoming a regular at your local coffee shop, bar, or gym. Achieving regularity will make it more likely that others will feel positively toward you. On the other hand, mere exposure means that to make friends, you have to show up again and again.
But mere exposure alone doesn’t build relationships; initiation does. I suggest building up “spontaneous communication” with other regulars over time and seeing if these scatters of interactions build the foundation for friendship. Spontaneous communication is unplanned conversation that occurs because two people are in the same place at the same time. It is in fleeting moments of chitchat that relationships are sprouted.
We can initiate a conversation with strangers by using the insight and question method developed by David Hoffeld, CEO and chief sales trainer at Hoffeld Group. This involves simply sharing a statement or insight and asking a question to follow up. We might say, “I really loved the main character in the book we read for book club. What did you think about her?” or “This drink is so sweet and tastes so good. How do you like yours?” or “It’s been so long since I’ve been to the beach and I’m so glad to be here. What do you like about the beach?”
It’s truly scary to talk to strangers, and to do so, I have to rev myself up by reminding myself to assume that people will like me and be open to talking to me—the opposite of what we typically assume, but in fact, an assumption that is closer to the truth. A study by Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder at the University of Chicago involved asking people to talk to a stranger on the train. Can you guess how many were shot down? None! According to Epley and Schroeder, “Commuters appeared to think that talking to a stranger posed a meaningful risk of social rejection. As far as we can tell, it posed no risk at all.”
Talking to strangers has helped me turn my neighbourhood into my community. As a graduate student, I spent many days at Star- bucks at a communal table with strangers, writing and reading re- search articles. At first, the people around me would fade into the background, human wallpaper, but eventually, through “spontaneous conversation,” as in “I’ve been working for so long. How’s your work coming along?” I started to connect to them. I’d see their familiar faces all around the neighbourhood—at the pool, a restaurant, or walking on the street. We’d say hi and the entire neighbourhood started feeling far less anonymous. There was something about bumping into people I knew that made me feel like I belonged. Those days at Starbucks turned my neighbourhood into my community.
My friendships have held me throughout the years, on February 14th and every day in between, in ways I had never thought possible.
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This is how it has gone for me when I have wanted to make friends: I show up at some sort of gathering or meetup. I usually feel clumsy and uncomfortable as a new person showing up to a meetup of people who’ve already built connections, get discouraged, and never return. But mere exposure is my reminder to keep showing up if I’m at a new social club, soccer league, or co-working space and I’m tempted to leave when things feel awkward. It is why you should live out our networking scenario and keep showing up for those monthly events. Mere exposure means not just that people will warm up to you at the social group over time, but also that you’ll come to like them more too. Initiate, unapologetically, and then do it again and again.
Mere exposure is justification for the value of persistence. In- stead of committing to a single happy hour to make friends, commit to a group for at least three months before dropping out, otherwise you’ll foil mere exposure. Then, take initiative by inviting your favourite person in the group to get smoothies. Mere exposure also leads us to expect that (1) making friends will be uncomfortable at first— all those unfamiliar faces that we’re programmed to be wary of; and (2) it’ll gradually begin to feel easier the more we show up.
Extracted from Platonic: How Understanding Your Attachment Style Can Help You Make and Keep Friends by Marisa G. Franco, PhD, out now.
