Friendship's Under-appreciated Dimension.

Geography plays a bigger role in friendships than most people give it credit for.

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I haven't really talked about friendship on this blog, but I think it's a pretty central component of it — for one, the title of the blog is all about learning from the people around you. In most cases, the people around you are your friends. So suffice to say, I hope to write a lot about human connection!

I have a spreadsheet where I track and try to quantify how good various parts of my life are going. Because of this, I can see quantitatively that more and better friendships would probably make my life a fair amount better (I can also definitely say so from a qualitative perspective, because so many of my favourite moments include friends and other people). I expect to write a lot of blog posts about this subject and how people can have more and better friendships. However, in this post, I want to talk about a particular element of friendship that I think is deeply undervalued, especially in the ever-larger cities that the human population continues to move to (which are great for many reasons, by the way).

Views of Metrotown Station with friends.

I think the issue can best be painted by an experience I had visiting friends in Montreal. Now, Montreal does benefit from being dense and fairly compact and that influences what I'm going to tell you, but what I saw that was quite amazing and really something I see is aspirational was the way that my friends in town were just constantly dropping by and seeing each other. Instead of mostly getting together in planned “hangs”, the situation reminded me more of the one I had with my grandparents when I was a kid: give them a call and ask if I can come over, or perhaps just show up and chat.

Underlying this very positive dynamic is, I think, possibly the most underrated element of friendship — proximity. If there's one thing I've told people around me would make me happier in the last year, it's having more friends that live nearby. A lot of people have noted that this is valuable over the years, but I want to try to explore it in a little more depth.

I can imagine all manner of reasons for having more close friends within my surroundings. One of the biggest is just how often mundane daily moments (admittedly these same moments are made much better by having kids), could be improved by having a friend around. Cooking up a big dinner? Invite the friends down the block over for a meal, and you can get a great conversation for free. I find there are a lot of moments like this in life: something good happens, or is about to happen, and if you have a friend at hand they can be part of it, otherwise it’s just you! These can be as simple as “I got a new accessory for my bike, this is neat and I wish I had a fellow bike enjoyer to enjoy this with” to “the weather is beautiful and it would be nice to sit in the park and chat with a friend”.

When I think of my various friends and their distance from me as well as the quality of our friendships, I think things mentally map out about how you would expect. If I consider friends to either be close friends or just a regular old friends, the close friends taper off with distance much more slowly than the regular friends (there is a distance though, while I maintain pretty good friendships with friends in Montreal, which is hundreds of kilometres away, my friendships with people I grew up with in Vancouver — thousands of kilometres away — are a lot more irregular). I don't think that there's any distance that can ruin a great friendship, but distance certainly adds friction (the wise person probably doesn't just think about distance as the crow flies, but the time it takes and the cost of seeing friends as well). I hope it's pretty obvious why regular friends taper off much more quickly — you're willing to travel a lot further to see someone who you have a deep relationship with, so naturally very good friends tend to keep in touch even if they're annoyingly far apart. The reality for more regular friendships is that while they're pleasant, they just aren't pleasant enough to justify say traveling an hour or two on a regular basis to maintain them.

At this point you might say something like, “I managed to keep up good relationships with people I don't see regularly” or “I video chat and play games with friends far away to stay close”. This is fine and may be true to some extent, but I (and I'm a technology person) am really skeptical that there's not a huge drop-off in quality from not actually sitting in front of a person. There are a lot of conversations you can have online, but there are many that you just can't.

Now, nothing about this dynamic is particularly interesting. When you consider the cost-benefit equation of seeing a friend, the more regular friends have a lower cost and a lower benefit, and the other friends have a higher cost and a higher benefit. Of course you might by chance live relatively close to a good friend, but this is usually fairly unlikely I find, because in big cities people tend to be fairly uniformly distributed, and since many people make friends with people who share their niche interests, distance is somewhat of an inevitability.

But I do actually think it's worth asking “what if it wasn't?” Mr. Money Moustache (who has more hits than misses in my opinion), has a great post on creating your own urban tribe. It just seems that you could really enrich your life by having more friends available!

As I mentioned earlier in the post, I've been telling people for quite some time that I want to make more friends local to me, and that's really just step one in finding some really close friends local to me. Friendship and social interaction is great, and I've kind of drawn it up in this quadrant system where you either really enjoy spending time with someone but can't do so for that many hours a week, or where you can see someone pretty easily, but it's not necessarily the most fulfilling thing. I think what would be valuable is to try to fill in the adjacent quadrant you have friends nearby who are extremely close and thus you can have a lot of very fulfilling experiences on a regular basis.

Having close friends near you (and actually taking advantage of the proximity) can and should be game changing. Bored? Stroll over to your friends. Need help with something, or someone to watch your kid or pets? Ask your close-close friend. It’s the beginnings of a really strong local community that could really enrich your life.

I think the natural question is how to actually find these people. I think there are basically two options: either you get much closer with your friends that already live nearby, or you meet new people in your area.

Becoming closer with the people you already know is certainly possible. Most people I know don't have an inertial attitude towards friendship — they are willing to ramp things up or down as various factors dictate. Because of this, I think it's absolutely plausible to just become good friends with people who you already know in your area. That being said, I think we kind of actively choose different people to be regular friends, as opposed to close friends — if we feel we have a lot that separates us, we may imagine someone as a person we’d see periodically, but not a person who we’d discuss our deepest struggles with. At the same time, while I think people generally don’t mind the idea of going from a more casual friendship to growing closer, there are people who don’t want more close friends (I think there is probably a limit on how many anybody can have), or who might be weirded out by the change.

The other option, which sort of feels more alluring (because who doesn’t love the unknown!) but also more challenging is meeting new friends in your area who can kind of move straight towards being close friends. When I think about my close friends, most of them arrived to me in one of two main ways: Either they were introduced to me by a third party who has established their trustworthiness somehow (this reminds me of how people tend to find those who have notably been in relationships more attractive — it’s a vote of confidence and a sort of proof that the person isn’t totally crazy), or they were a person who I regularly interacted with — say in school, or another activity — and eventually became friends with. Actually coming across more friends like this should be straightforward — either you ask people you respect if they know people in your area who they might introduce you to, or start joining activities and groups where you can meet other people. I think as an adult you’re at somewhat of a disadvantage in that you need to seek out these opportunities, but they should be higher-yielding because you can choose groups and activities where you think you’ll be more likely to have common interests with prospective friends.

All of this is to say that:

1. I think having friends that live near you is great.

2. I think having close friends near you is probably exponentially greater.

Now, I have to be honest, I’ve been living in my current location for the better part of a year (since before my child was born), and I have made very little progress. To a large extent this is because I haven’t had that much time aside from parenting — at most a couple hours a day — and also because people naturally go out less in wintertime in my part of Canada. That being said, it would not be honest to say I’ve put in enough of an effort. Recently I’ve been visiting public child and family centres quite regularly, and to be honest it has been a great way to make conversation with other parents, but it hasn’t gone beyond conversation to “Hey, maybe we should get together with our kids sometime!”. Beyond that I haven’t done a whole lot, and I’d love to hear people’s thoughts and idea in the comments!