Similarity, Proximity, Reciprocity Friendship Building
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Jemma Spann's two-track system for adult friendship: hold the existing relationships, and build new ones on the three known determinants of friendship — similarity, proximity and reciprocity. For existing friends, one person must take the initiative, and the cheapest durable form is a fixed recurring slot with near-zero coordination cost. For new friends, you stop chasing novelty and instead show up to the same activity in the same building at the same time each week, which manufactures both similarity (you already share the interest) and proximity (you keep seeing the same faces). The underlying insight is that university friendships come from quantity time, not quality time. Reciprocity is then earned through active listening — eye contact, visualising the other person's story, and reading body cues.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Decide to be the initiator
If you want to see these people, be the person who takes initiative. It costs energy and it is usually one person in every friendship group who carries it.
Watch out If everyone is busy and nobody initiates, calendars never line up and six months pass.
- 2
Create one recurring, low-friction slot
Run something like a Sunday dinner or a Saturday brunch club. Open invitation to anyone in town, bring wine or dessert, tell me four hours in advance, bring partners.
Pro tip A discrete known day is far easier for busy people to navigate than ad-hoc scheduling.
- 3
Pick activities that carry built-in similarity
Cycling classes, rock climbing, an indoor football team — anything where everyone in the room already shares the interest you would otherwise have to discover.
- 4
Show up consistently to the same place and time
Same location, same activity, same building, week in week out. The same people will be there, and you become familiar faces in each other's lives.
Pro tip Think quantity time over quality time — that is why people befriend whoever they lived next to at university.
Watch out Attending sporadically produces no familiarity at all, no matter how good the activity is.
- 5
Convert familiarity into contact
Once you are familiar, strike up a conversation. 'Are you coming next week?' becomes 'we should get a coffee beforehand', or joining them at the pub afterwards — and that is the friendship formed.
- 6
Practise active listening
Make eye contact, sit in the person's words, picture yourself inside the story they are telling, and read their body cues to check whether they feel comfortable or safe. Visualising makes you more engaged and makes you seem more engaged, because you are.
Pro tip Ask what you can adjust in your own body language to make the other person more comfortable.
Watch out This generation is not naturally good at it — constant stimulus makes sustained attention a trained skill, not a default.
In the wild
Every Sunday she is in town, Jemma tells anyone she knows living in Sydney to come for dinner. The rules are deliberately minimal: bring a bottle of wine, bring dessert, bring something, bring partners, and just let her know about four hours in advance. She describes it as the glue for several of her relationships — not because people come for free food, but because a fixed, known day removes the scheduling friction that otherwise kills adult friendships.
→ Busy friends stay in regular contact without anyone having to negotiate calendars.
Having moved cities about eighteen months earlier and left an entire community behind, Jemma invested time in going consistently to the same activities — cycling classes and rock climbing — week in, week out. Because the same people kept appearing and everyone in the room already shared the interest, similarity and proximity were both satisfied before a word was exchanged. She reports making many friends this way, with conversation starting naturally once people had become familiar faces.
→ A rebuilt friendship circle in a city where she started with nobody.
Common mistakes
Waiting for someone else to organise
Everyone is busy and initiation is the scarce resource. If you want the relationships, you have to be the one who calls it.
Half-arsing attendance
Ali's kickboxing example: signing up, then skipping the group classes because of work means zero chance of befriending anyone there. Consistency is the whole mechanism.
Chasing quality time over quantity time
Repeated low-stakes exposure builds friendship far more reliably than occasional big catch-ups.
From the transcript
“I truly believe that you should be the person to take initiative”
“similarity we know is the biggest biggest determinant of friendship similarity and proximity and then reciprocity”
“practice active listening practice actually making eye contact with someone”
From the episode
5 Skills to Level Up Your Life - Season 6 Roundup
Season 6 Roundup