Proximity matters
Research suggests most friendships are fragile and ultimately fall apart when not constantly maintained
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I’ve written many times before about how a few years ago I decided to move from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. There were a lot of factors that went into that decision, but a big part of it was the desire to be physically closer to the largest number of my family and friends.
In other words, I was gradually realizing what would become one of the main theses of this newsletter, and which is the topic for today: That physical proximity to those in your proverbial village matters. As handy as electronic communication is, and as fun as it can be to reconnect with an old friend after years apart1, simply being in close physical proximity to people is important for building the kind of day-to-day support network a lot of us long for.
As it turns out (and unsurprisingly), I wasn’t the first person to come to this realization, and researchers have actually documented the value of having friends and family nearby.
In Robin Dunbar’s book Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, he discusses what he calls the “thirty minute rule”:
You will make the effort to see someone, and view them as important to you, if they live within thirty minutes travel time of where you live. It doesn’t seem to matter much whether this is thirty minutes on foot, by bicycle or by car. It’s the psychological significance of the time it takes you to get there. That being so, you might suppose that you would be more inclined to phone or text those who live beyond the thirty-minute limit to make up for the fact that you can’t get round to see them in person. In fact, it seems that you don’t. You are more likely to phone the friends who live near you2 3.
Rarely have I read something that more thoroughly describes my own experience.
While living in Los Angeles, for example, there were people I literally never saw — and who I’ve subsequently lost contact with — because they lived on the city’s West Side when I lived in East Hollywood. As the crow flies, I was really only 10 to 15 miles away from them. But with traffic and parking it took at least 30 minutes to get there. I had no idea at the time that I was obeying a kind of informal rule of social science.
Dunbar goes on to reiterate that the research shows that “you phone most often the people you see most often.” And, via a study from one community in Canada, he breaks down how the phenomenon works over various distances.
They found that there was a clear break-point for face-to-face contacts when two people lived more than five miles apart, with a further drop off at about fifty miles (about an hour’s drive) and another at 100 miles (the limit for a comfortable day trip — well, in Canada anyway!). Phone calls showed a broadly similar pattern, albeit at a slower rate of decline, with a particularly sharp decline at around 100 miles4.
Dunbar later notes that when people move away from each other and don’t get to meet up very often, “friendships seem to flag surprisingly quickly”5.
I could end this post here, because that’s the main point. Like it or not, across multiple studies in multiple place at multiple times, researchers have found that proximity matters and electronic forms of communication have not proven able to change that fact.
But there are a few caveats.
First, researchers found some friendships do survive over long distances. But the number of friendships that fall into this category “are very few in number - maybe just three or four.”
We can pick up these relationships years later exactly where we left them off. But for the rest, friendships are fickle things, here today and gone tomorrow. In many cases, they are just matters of convenience — someone to party with or go on day trips with, who will do for the moment in the absence of anyone better”6.
It’s worth noting here that “three or four” is no where near the number of relationships a person needs to feel supported or to have that village-like network. Dunbar himself is most famous for coming up with “Dunbar’s number,” which is the idea that people can maintain 150 stable relationships7. Dunbar has further broken this idea down into concentric circles of closeness — best friends, causal friends, acquaintances, etc. — but even the smallest and closest circle tends to have more than four people in it.
I suspect this is why many of us who have moved around for jobs end up lonely; we’re able to maintain a few friendships across distances, but most of our social network evaporates. Before long, we don’t even call.
The second caveat is that I find some comfort in the finding that many friendships for most people are “fickle” and (as the book also points out) affairs of convenience. One of the things that’s being frustrating as an adult is the sense that, while I may have many acquaintances, I don’t have a lot of really close friends.
But it turns out that’s pretty normal.
Thanks for reading to the end of this post. If you’ve enjoyed Nuclear Meltdown, consider sharing it with a friend.
News to read this week:
How to Avoid the Worst Parenting Mistake
“Green: Why do you think your readers look to experts for guidance on some of the most intimate decisions about their domestic and family lives? In another time or universe, people might look to their pastor or their family members or their neighbors to help them with decision making about their family life. Why do people look to an economist they don’t know for that?
Oster: I think there’s a broader reason, having nothing to do with economists. We are, in a lot of cases, raising our kids in environments that are not the town we grew up in and not around our parents—environments that are more individualistic. So there is a search for sources of information or help with some of these decisions.
There’s also been a societal move toward the idea of data as an important thing that we know how to analyze and use to make decisions. Even in the decade since I published my first book, the idea of personal data has become a much bigger thing. I think that’s part of the appeal of the stuff that I write.”
How the bobos broke America
“Like any class, the bobos are a collection of varied individuals who tend to share certain taken-for-granted assumptions, schemas, and cultural rules. Members of our class find it natural to leave their hometown to go to college and get a job, whereas people in other classes do not. In study after study, members of our class display more individualistic values, and a more autonomous sense of self, than other classes. Members of the creative class see their career as the defining feature of their identity, and place a high value on intelligence. Usage of the word smart increased fourfold in The New York Times from 1980 to 2000, according to Michael Sandel’s recent book, The Tyranny of Merit—and by 2018 usage had nearly doubled again.”
Paid Leave In The US vs. The World
This is truly one of the great pleasures of getting a little older.
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. Robin Dunbar. 2021. Page 102.
There’s some interesting overlap here with the world of urban design. Commuters, for example also appear to respond to a kind of 30 minute rule. And walkability advocates often push for 15 minute cities or neighborhoods, meaning a place is walkable if you can reach destinations within a 15 minute walk. I’m going to make a leap here and suggest that all of this happens because we’re conditioned to think of “our place” as roughly an area that we can reach in a short amount of time.
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. Robin Dunbar. 2021. Page 102.
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. Robin Dunbar. 2021. Page 103. See also page 105.
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. Robin Dunbar. 2021. Page 104.
Dunbar’s book includes an exhaustive explanation of how he arrived at that number. I highly recommend just reading the book, but suffice it to say here that its the result of research across a vast array of locations and cultures.