The Friendships You Weren’t Looking For: Why Proximity Matters More Than We Think

I owe my soccer friends an apology.

Not because I did anything particularly terrible to them. Mostly because, before I really knew them, I had already decided who they were.

Crazy sports parents.

I saw them, made some assumptions, and kept my distance.

And then I actually got to know them.

I was so wrong.

Some of those women are now among my closest friends, which is both lovely and mildly embarrassing. It also has me thinking about how many adult friendships begin this way—not because we decide, I need a new friend, but because life keeps putting the same person in front of us until eventually we pay attention.

That’s what Jessica and I talked about on Chasing Brighter this week: the friendships that found us. The sideline friends. The work friends. The school-event friends. The people we walked past for months before something shifted and suddenly we actually knew each other. CBS6 October Scripts (1)

But I keep coming back to a question we didn’t fully explore in the episode:

Why do some of these accidental friendships become so important?

Maybe We’ve Been Underestimating Proximity

There’s something very unromantic about saying, “We became friends because we happened to be in the same place a lot.”

We like better origin stories.

We clicked immediately. We had so much in common. We just knew.

Sometimes that’s true.

But psychology has been studying the role of proximity and familiarity in relationships for decades. The basic idea is pretty simple: being physically near someone creates more opportunities for interaction, and repeated exposure can increase familiarity and liking. The American Psychological Association actually includes both proximity and familiarity among the factors that can influence how relationships develop. American Psychological Association

Which makes me look differently at all those hours spent on sidelines, in school pickup lines, at practices, in offices, at kids’ events and in the other extremely glamorous settings of adult life.

Maybe those hours aren’t just dead time we’re trying to get through.

They’re opportunities to slowly know people.

Research from University of Kansas professor Jeffrey Hall makes this even more interesting. His research found that friendship takes time—a lot more than one great conversation. His estimates suggest roughly 40–60 hours together to move toward casual friendship, 80–100 hours to become friends, and more than 200 hours to become close friends. The type of time mattered, too: hanging out and talking were associated with growing closer. KU News

Two hundred hours sounds enormous.

Until I think about youth sports.

Then it sounds like approximately one season.

Adult Friendship May Be Happening While We’re Doing Something Else

I think this is the part I find reassuring.

There’s so much advice about adult friendship that makes it sound like one more project we’re failing to properly manage.

Join something. Reach out. Schedule the coffee. Maintain the friendship. Remember the birthday. Be vulnerable. Follow up.

All useful advice. We actually have an older Chasing Brighter post about how to make friends as an adult that talks about many of those things.

But the friendships we’re talking about this week remind me that connection doesn’t always begin with effort.

Sometimes it begins with repetition.

You sit beside someone at enough games.

You make the same joke during another absurdly early practice.

You slowly graduate from “How’s it going?” to talking about something real.

You see each other tired, annoyed, worried, distracted and laughing way too hard at something that probably wasn’t that funny.

And somewhere in there, without an official announcement, this person stops being the mom I talk to at soccer and becomes my friend.

I like that version of friendship because there’s very little performance involved.

Nobody showed up at a 7 a.m. tournament trying to present her most compelling self.

We were just there.

The Problem Is That We Decide Who People Are Too Quickly

Of course, proximity only helps if we’re actually open to the people nearby.

Which brings me back to my soccer friends.

My first impression wasn’t completely invented. I probably saw or heard something that gave me my “crazy sports parents” theory.

The problem was how quickly I turned an impression into a conclusion.

I do this more than I’d like to admit.

She’s not my kind of person.

We probably don’t have anything in common.

She’s intimidating.

She’s too this. I’m too that.

Sometimes we’re right. Not everyone standing beside us needs to become our new best friend.

But sometimes we’ve built an entire personality for someone we’ve barely spoken to.

Jessica admitted something similar in the episode. There was a mom she met through her daughter’s softball years whom she initially found intimidating. Once they actually talked, Jessica discovered the woman had been nervous, too. They’ve now been friends for almost a decade. CBS6 October Scripts (1)

I love that story because it makes me wonder how often two people are standing six feet apart, each privately deciding the other one isn’t interested.

Friendship Doesn’t Always Announce Itself

Maybe one reason these friendships surprise us is that we don’t recognize them while they’re forming.

There isn’t usually a moment when someone says, “Congratulations, we’ve now spent 80 hours together and have officially transitioned from acquaintances to friends.”

It happens quietly.

Someone remembers something you told her three weeks ago.

She saves you a seat.

You text her something that has absolutely nothing to do with the activity that introduced you.

One of you has a terrible week, and suddenly the conversation goes somewhere deeper.

Then one day you realize this person who entered your life almost accidentally has become part of it.

That feels worth noticing.

And Maybe Worth Saying Out Loud

This was the other part of our conversation that stayed with me.

We spend a lot of time appreciating our friends internally.

She’s such a good friend.

I’m so glad I met her.

She really got me through that.

But how often do we actually tell her?

Jessica brought up psychologist Sara Algoe’s work on gratitude and relationships. Algoe developed what she calls the “find-remind-and-bind” theory of gratitude: gratitude can help us notice people who are good relationship partners, remind us about the value of relationships we already have, and strengthen those bonds. Greater Good

Research on gratitude within relationships has also found associations between everyday gratitude and greater feelings of connection and relationship satisfaction. Much of this particular research has been conducted with romantic couples, so I don’t want to stretch it into a sweeping claim about every friendship. But the underlying idea is one I keep thinking about: noticing what someone has meant to us—and expressing it—can be relationally meaningful. Greater Good

Which makes the Brighter Move from this week’s episode almost embarrassingly simple:

Tell them.

Not “Love you, girl!”

Something specific.

You made that season so much easier for me.

I don’t think you know how much those conversations on the sidelines meant to me.

I’m really glad I was completely wrong about you.

That last one happens to be mine.

I’m Paying More Attention to the People Already Around Me

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about friendship as something we have to maintain or intentionally create.

I’m starting to think there is another part of it: noticing.

Who keeps showing up in the ordinary parts of your life?

Who do you find yourself talking to a little longer each time?

Who have you already categorized before you’ve given them much of a chance?

And who started as someone you happened to stand next to and somehow became one of your people?

I don’t think every acquaintance is a friendship waiting to happen. But my soccer friends are pretty good evidence that I’m not always qualified to make that call after twenty minutes.

So I’m trying to leave a little more room for surprise.

I’d love to know: Who is a friend you never went looking for—and how did they find their way into your life?

And if someone immediately came to mind, maybe tell them.

That’s what I’m doing this week.

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