Friendships don’t just happen

Friendships don’t just happen, they don’t drop from the sky.”

– William Rawlins, Professor of interpersonal communication, Ohio University.

Like any relationship, friendships take effort and work. But they’re often the last to receive that effort after people expend their energy on work, family, and romance. 

Ryan Hubbard, who works in “design for social innovation,” started a research project called Kitestring to try to figure out how people organize their lives to prioritize friendship, and some of the more specific ways that friendships get deeper.

His study came up with several interesting insights and here is one of them.

The more points of connection you have with someone, the stronger the friendship will be. If see think of friendship as a singular connection, we see a friend as some one who you see in only one context. But when it’s a more of a structure that enables you to connect someone who you see in many contexts, and connect with over many different things, rather than a single shared interest, you are likely to be have more close friendship with that person.