The Friendship Formula

Have you ever wondered why your friends are your friends? Rather, if your friends are just like you or completely different, there was something that brought y’all together. I have many friends who are just like me, but many more that are very different. I always thought to myself, “Why am I friends with them if they are this different from me?” Maybe it was because opposites attract? After reading many books I found something that explained why I had the friends that I did. It was called the friendship formula. The friendship formula is a blind of proximity, frequency, duration, and intensity that two or more people share that cause them to be friends.

Proximity

Proximity is the distance between you and another individual and your exposure to that individual over time. This would make sense because it would be much harder for you to be friends with a person who you don’t see or that lives to far away. Most of your friends are more than likely people you grew up with or went to school with as some point. As time passed you make have got new friends because you moved to a new place, went to a different school, or got a new job. Whatever the case, your friends were people who were physically close to you or at least someone you were exposed to more than others.

Frequency/Duration

Frequency is the number of contacts you have with another individual over time and duration is the length of time you spend with another individual over time. Proximity along could not be the only reason you are friends with the people you’re friends with. If this was the cause, you would be friends with every person you've ever seen in your school or work place. From all the people who are in close proximity of you, the ones you have the most frequent contact with are most likely to be your friends. Think about it like this, in school there are many people who walk in the same hallway as you but there are also those who have class with you. You are more likely to be friends with the people in your class because you see them more often.

Seeing a person a lot of times and seeing a person a long time are two different things with two different effects. If this class that only lasted for 10 minutes and another class that lasted three hours, you would be closers to the people in the three-hour class. My theory behind this is that the longer you are with a person, the better you can get to know them. Frequency plays a huge role, but the effects are not as strong with out duration and vice versa.

Intensity

Intensity is how strongly you are able to satisfy another person’s psychological and/or physical needs through the use of verbal and nonverbal behaviors. One form of intensity is curiosity. Everyone has a space bubble, when anything new comes into your space bubble it sends a signal to your brain. When the signal gets to your brain, you perceive it a threat or non-threat. Anything (or in this case, any person) that enters your space that is not perceived as a threat you become curious about. Think about it like this, if you have a cat and you throw something at the cat the first thing its going to do is run away. Once the cat sees there is no danger it will go to the object you tossed at it and give it a stiff, that’s the curiosity I’m speaking of. Once you become curious about a person the intensity starts to form. It forms because you are more open to that person because you want them to be open to you. It's normal behavior to want to give something to someone who gave you something, in this case personal information, as part of making the friendship equal. As you and this other person become more curious about each other and share more stories, you intensify the relationship and form deeper, meaningful relationship.