Mel Robbins quoted a study from MIT that said the single most important factor for determining friendships is proximity.  In order for you to connect w/ people you have to spend time with them.  It takes 50 hours of time with another person to become casual friends. 90 hours to consider them a friend. You need 200 hours w/ someone in order for you to consider someone a close friend.  This is why it feels so hard to make friends as an adult. I want to caveat this with the fact that I have spent these amounts of hours with people and I did consider them my closest friends.  But after a time I realized that we were only spending time focusing on their needs and wants.  Sure they would do nice things like buy us dinner and we would hang out and yes, they even helped in some really low places in our lives.  But it was still consistently, completely, and always about them.  Just because someone is near you doesn’t mean they are really your friends.  So the other key to friendship is mutual understanding and reciprocity.  The same effort and focus on a friendship.  Mutual interests, great  But being forced to adapt to someone else’s personality and to be who they are and what they want all the time is exhausting—and we aren’t here to be anyone but who we are.

I also know first hand that there are people close to me who I didn’t really speak with for a long time, I didn’t know who they were because I had a negative/misinformed first perception.  It was the people who “got” to us first that informed us of the negative qualities of everyone else—and I knew immediately that they would say the same things about us when we weren’t around.  When I started accepting and spending time with this other group of people, I found out that this is something more in line with my personality.  I only found that out because I ended up being forced to spend time with them and I really struggled at first because I had no clue how skewed my introduction had been.  And now that things have developed, I can say without a doubt that it was worth breaking out of my comfort zone and ignoring other people’s perceptions.  I was frustrated at first because of the circumstances, but with time and discussion and learning more about people, I learned to find more of myself.  Saying yes to things allows us to experience things first hand and decide what really works for us, what fits. 

Now I want to throw one last piece in here, a sort of middle ground.  There are people who we become friends with (or at least friendly with) based on where we are—we work together, we live next door, we are part of the same club, we like the same food, whatever it may be.  Some of those relationships form some of the strongest bonds.  But my closest relationship, the person I trust the most, now lives over 3 hours away—which is closer than their previous 9 hours away, so progress!—and this is a person I adore, who is truly my best friend.  Do we see each other every day? Do we speak every day?  Not always—but the love is very real and it is always there.  There is space for us to be who we are and we respect that about each other.  We’ve pursued different lives but we are always connected.  So there are some bonds formed of situation and others that are inevitable, a design of the universe.  I guess one could argue all relationships are a design of the universe because we meet everyone for a reason, a season, or a lifetime, right?  But I mean that there are soul people, people who have been with us through lifetimes and iterations who simply FIT.  Who simply need to be in our lives.  So proximity and time may be a determining factor—and that often is the beginning of most relationships (you can’t be with someone you don’t know)—but there are also bonds that quite literally transcend time and location.  So I would argue that the heart is the single most important factor in determining friendships—or at least genuine, lasting friendships. 

I’ve learned first had that you can be physically close and still miles apart mentally.  And you can have great distance in between and still feel 100% seen and understood. Form that perspective I would respectfully disagree from experience that proximity means nothing in terms of finding those who are meant to be with us.  Proximity can often equal convenience but that is the fastest way to get to burn out—at some point those relationships become a power struggle—whose needs or interests are going to be answered first?  And do we have truly similar patterns/values/beliefs?  There comes a point where we simply understand that we are around each other because we are around each other.  We latch onto the first thing that made sense in the moment, the nearest thing.  And we learn after time that people won’t necessarily accept us as we are and it was simply a matter of convenience.  There are relationships that work like that, we all have them.  But I’m looking for more than that—I don’t want what was easy, I want what is real.  There is convenience and there is connection—sometimes it can be both but when it is one over the other, take connection every day.