Why ‘locationship’ could be the key to making friends as an adult

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.