How your geography affects your friendships
If friendship is a function of time, look at where you are spending yours
" [Jeffrey Hall] found that it took about forty-five hours spent in each other’s company after first meeting for someone to progress from being an acquaintance to becoming a casual friend. People who averaged only thirty hours together over nine weeks (the equivalent of just 15 minutes a day) remained acquaintances.
To move from being a casual friend to a meaningful friend called for another fifty hours spent together over the course of three months, while those who advanced to be best friends took another 100 hours to be spent together. In effect, to make it into the most intimate category of friendship required something close to two hours a day to be devoted to the friend, day after day, for some considerable time. Friendship does not come cheap."- Robin Dunbar: Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships
One of the greatest lessons I learned in 2020 had a lot to do with relationships. The forced slow down gave me a window to look at my life with fresh eyes. One of the things that became massively clear was that I had created a life full of wonderful people, but who were in highly distinct social networks - aka almost zero overlap in people.
Being spread so thin made it challenging to build deeper relationships because I was not spending enough time in any given social network to deepen a friendship further.
If my story is the micro level, the macro level is America’s well documented loneliness crisis. People are struggling to develop meaningful relationships with others. And while there are many possible reasons why this is the case, I have found it to be helpful to be really pragmatic about the mechanics of friendship and let that help me find friends and hopefully be a better friend as a result.
Here is the key thing - time is the critical factor. Dunbar, a professor at Oxford, and others are quite clear on this. Time is also the thing in least supply for most of us once out of college.
As a result, we have to be even more strategic about how we use our limited time, if we want to have reasonable odds of building a friendship. So to that end, let’s begin with geography. Consider, the 5 places in a given week where you spend the majority of your time. For many, the list looks something like this:
Where you live
Where you work
Where you practice your faith (if applicable)
Where your kids attend school
Any "third places" - hobby/coffee-shop/local pub
Each of these locations has its own social network. Groups of people who are interacting and spending time together with some regularity.
With your given list of locations, take a look at your current friend network and determine where you overlap. It could be a simple table like this:
If you are like me, you probably find that most of your friends have a single check box. If you overlap in more than one, pay attention - that is a potentially (if not already) strong friend, simply due to the ease with which you can spend time together. If you overlap in none, it is going to take a lot of intentionality and effort to maintain the friendship.
The challenge and opportunity then is ultimately a coordination problem - how frequently do you and your friend overlap in a circle where it is possible to interact?
Notice as well that the more overlap these social networks have, it will also increase the odds of what Professor Mark Granovetter called, "weak ties." Weak ties are casual networks - acquaintances with a degree of familiarity but not necessarily deep friendship.
By having overlap in networks, you simply see the same people more frequently. Granovetter and others have highlighted that these relationships bring greater opportunity and higher levels of happiness.
Of course, the more compressed your social network becomes, it also becomes less diverse. This may mean echo-chambers of particular points of view. It could be more mundane conversation if everyone all goes on vacation to the same places. Preserving spaces for diversity in your interactions is also good - places where you may encounter new groups of people, new experiences, and new ideas.
The point of all this is that while friendship has its more intangible elements, there is an exceptionally programatic level to it - simply how much time you spend together. In the time constrained world we live in, it will be to your advantage to understand where you spend time and where your friends are spending time - and adapt accordingly. A side benefit is that it may help you create good networks of weak ties, which while different from close friendship, also correlate with happiness.