Some Unusual Facts About Making New Friends
As we get older, our opportunities to meaningfully connect with others dwindle, and so does our actual desire to do so. But even though the desire to see old friends and make new ones diminishes, our need for intimacy doesn’t.
This is why many of us start to feel isolated and perhaps a little lonely once we hit our thirties.
Now that the world has moved away from physical distancing and lockdowns, I’ll use this article to set out some ground rules for making new friends. I'll describe some helpful facts that will make it easier for you to create the right conditions for meeting new, interesting people you'll want to spend time with.
You can then read this follow-up article on making new friends, where I offer a long list of tips for widening your friendship circle after your twenties.
Fact #1: We need others to mirror our ‘selves’
We depend on others for our survival. In evolutionary terms, those with advanced social skills often had the upper hand over those who simply looked good.
Indeed, social skills are incredibly useful from a survival perspective because they allow us to build trust and negotiate resources. I scratch your back so you can scratch mine later, etc. Throw in a shoulder rub and a happy ending and you’ll receive eternal loyalty.
Of course, we seek more than just practical benefits from other people. We also crave belonging and affection, which is what drives us to establish long-lasting relationships and seek out friendships.
Friendships play an essential role in developing our sense of identity and self-esteem.
They allow us to compare ourselves with others – inside and outside of our group. Through that comparison, we can define our likes and dislikes while at the same time developing and reinforcing our personal beliefs and our value system.
We get to choose which tribes and social groups we attach ourselves to. By seeking acceptance from those tribes, we can feel part of something that's bigger and more important than ourselves. Our friendship circles help us build a clearer identity for ourselves because by learning who’s inside and outside of our circle, we get to know ourselves better too.
Fact #2: Proximity is key to making new friends
Perhaps a statement of the obvious, but worth reminding: the functional distance between two people is the most powerful predictor of whether they’re likely to hit it off as friends. Functional distance means how often your paths cross rather than how physically close you live to each other.
This is basic mathematics. Suppose you keep you bumping into Helen from Finance in the Starbucks downstairs. You’re more likely to become aware of her existence than if you only meet at the Christmas party once a year. Seeing her regularly also makes it more plausible you’ll start a conversation about her disgusting banana split frappuccino habit.
Whether your paths cross in the default world or on Zoom doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you start noticing each other regularly.
The familiarity principle is at play here. Often used in advertising, it banks on people being attracted to things and people they’re already familiar with. As a result of this principle, any initial dislike we feel for others often fades once we’re exposed to them more regularly.
I'm sure you can think of some examples too where regular exposure to someone has made you dislike them even more. That's because the familiarity principle only works when we feel there’s something in it for us. We’ll only force ourselves to like others if the particular social set-up requires us to do so. When that isn’t the case, we’re more likely to notice our lack of similarity, making the initial dislike even worse.
Also, while functional distance is essential when it comes to making new friends, it stops being a requirement for maintaining those friendships. If COVID taught us one thing is that many of our connections survive and thrive despite a lack of physical closeness.
Fact #3 — Physical attraction matters (even if you don’t want to see your friends naked)
This may come as a surprise, but physical appearance is an important indicator of whether we decide whether we’ll initiate a friendship or not.
Plenty of research shows that just like we prefer to buy beautiful things, we also like hanging out with people we deem attractive. Rightly or wrongly, we associate attractiveness with other socially desirable traits.
Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and this isn’t necessarily about conventional standards of attractiveness. Quite frankly, we're a narcissistic and incestuous bunch when it comes to physical attraction. Indeed, studies show we’re most drawn to those who resemble ourselves or a parent of the opposite sex. That probably explains why I have such great taste in friends. Thanks, mum.
While attraction predicts whether we’ll initiate a friendship – it plays much less of a role once we've decided to give that friendship a go.
And if the thought of seeing your friends naked churns your stomach, note that physical attraction doesn’t necessarily mean sexual attraction. Having said that, plenty of wonderful friendships do indeed start in the sack, and there’s a lot to be said for having 'friends with benefits'.
Fact #4 — Birds of a feather rock together
While proximity and attraction determine if we make the first move, once both of you decide to develop that friendship it becomes much more about personalities and personal values.
We like those who like us. The greater the similarity between someone’s demeanour and yours, the more likeable you’ll find that person.
The reason is obvious. When someone acts, talks and thinks like us, it validates how we act, talk and think. It supports our sense of self, our beliefs, and our values. So, by interacting with others who are similar, we reinforce and validate how wonderful we are ourselves.
Yuval Noah Harari talks about this in his bestseller Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind. He claims it’s because we developed the ability to gossip about each other and tell stories that we now rule the planet. Our capacity to badmouth Helen from Finance allows us to bond and reinforce the ‘us versus them’ I mentioned earlier.
A creepy study by Dartmouth College found that friends often have similar neural responses to real-world events. Researchers were able to correctly identify participants’ friends just by looking at how their brains responded to video clips. Close friends shared similar neural activity patterns, more so than friends-of-friends who, in turn, had more similar neural activity than people who were three degrees removed (friends-of-friends-of-friends).
It gets even creepier. Research by the University of California suggests that we naturally seek out friends with similar genotypes to our own. In fact, its data found that friend pairs were genetically closer to each other on average than they were to their fourth cousins.
I guess you might want to be a bit careful after all about those friends with benefits.
Fact #5: Show them yours. They’ll show you theirs
Intimacy and proximity are a powerful friendship mix. That’s why intense experiences like group work, hikes, retreats, or losing yourself for 24 hours in Berghain often create new friendships and accelerate existing ones.
Such experiences require a high level of intimacy and vulnerability, and without those levels of intimacy and self-disclosure, there can be no friendship.
Self-disclosure can be factual (I don’t drink coffee) or emotional (banana split frappuccino makes me want to vomit). It can be non-intimate (I don’t like the sweet taste of it) or intimate (I can’t drink it because I have IBS).
If you want to make a new friend, you’ll have to walk a tightrope between being boring (factual) and intense (emotional). Yet, research shows that friendship responds better to self-disclosure around intimate than non-intimate topics. You probably wouldn’t want to lead with your IBS symptoms though.
As a friendship matures, intimacy and self-disclosure should naturally increase as both of you start to feel more comfortable revealing negative information and become more honest with one another.
But remember that emotional intimacy doesn’t mean unrestricted venting. Nobody likes and complainer and like seeks like. If you’re a constant downer, then you’ll find negative people might flock to you. The same applies when you ooze a nice positive energy.
So go ahead. Be positive and vulnerable. It’s pretty damn attractive.
Fact #6: Flattery gets you everywhere
While proximity and attraction are deciding factors in whether you initiate a friendship or not, intimacy and vulnerability help propel it forward. But one extra bit of glue keeps most friendships together – flattery.
In psychology, they prefer to call it ‘social identity support’. It relates to anything that supports our sense of self in our group or society. Our social identity can be based on our nationality, profession, gender, sports team, sexual preference, religion, or pretty much any club we’re a member of.
We prefer spending time with people who validate us as cherished members of the same clubs or categories we belong to.
For example, Mensa members – the club for people with a high IQ – are probably more likely to be friends with other members of Mensa than with the average CrossFit club member. I’m not saying clever people don’t like CrossFit or that CrossFitters aren’t clever. But there’s not so much commonality between both, which means one is unlikely to validate the membership of the other.
Although one commonality they do share is the tendency to tell you they belong to either within he first two minutes of introducing themselves.
And yes, while social identity support is important, do keep it real. Making new friends requires trust, and that involves frankness and honesty in equal measure.
Fact #7: You can become friends with a Tamagotchi
Okay, friends might be an exaggeration, but people can and do form strong attachments to objects.
In the 2013 film Her, Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a Siri-like operating system designed to meet his every need. This being Hollywood, of course, he falls in love with it.
When he finally admits to his ex-wife that he’s been in a relationship with an operating system, she blurts out: ‘You always wanted to have a wife without the challenges of actually having to deal with anything real, so I’m glad you found one’.
Good for him.
According to researchers at Brown University, this universal need to belong means that – at least in theory – humans can bond with robots but only on one condition: robots need to be social enough to reciprocate with regular and meaningful interactions.
What those interactions look like is different for everyone. Some people are pretty good at anthropomorphising objects, animals and robots. Others feel a bit idiotic doing so. In theory, however, any object we perceive to have a capacity for meaningful interaction could pass a legitimate friendship partner.
So there you go. Whether your Furby, Tamagotchi, iPhone 12 or your Japanese love doll has the technical ability to interact with you socially doesn't matter. If you experience said object as a social being and as having a personality, you can become friends with it.
Now, Alexa sweetheart – put on some Netflix and let’s chill.
