It Turns Out There Is A Formula For Improving Relationships
How an equation helped me to be a better friend.
An equation for friendship? Really? What next, an astrological chart for recruitment?
It’s easy to scoff at the idea of a friendship formula. Reducing the dynamic and nuanced ways that two people think and feel about each other to a handful of algebraic values feels like an act of gross simplification, especially for the romantic in me, who doesn’t want to believe that the magic of human connection can be plussed, minused and summed.
Reductionism, however, is inevitable in the effort to understand and plan for human behavior. It is impossible to perfectly predict people’s future actions or interactions, so we agree to base our thinking on patterns and probabilities. We believe that offering a seat on the bus to an elderly person is a caring and usually gratefully-received gesture. Occasionally the recipient of the gesture may take offense — perhaps the hurt pride of being presumed old! — still, giving up your seat remains the course of action most likely to lead to a positive outcome for both parties.
That is essentially what the authors of friendship equations are trying to do — suggest a predictable path to better relationships. Given that relationships are vital for happiness, healthiness and success, I took a closer look at a handful of these efforts to quantify the unquantifiable.
On the truly algebraic end of the scale is this equation from writer, Jonathan Stokes. He explains it in full here, but it essentially states that friendship is the sum of past and future interactions, so that the absence of the promise of future interactions reduces the net present value of friendship — i.e., if I won’t see you again, I care less about you. Such an equation might be interpreted as a timely reminder to the digitally inclined among us that time spent together is key to bonding. Some of us can probably cite a relationship that blossomed during absence, but, like the offended octogenarian on the bus, counterpoints are more exception than rule.
Like Stokes, Cy Wakeman’s take on relationship ROI is built upon current and future time spent together. But Wakeman presents her equation as a way to help you analyze whether you should maintain your current friendships. She suggests you should ask yourself three questions about a friendship. Firstly, what is its current value? Does the person make me the best me? Secondly, what is its future value? Do you expect they’ll continue to help you grow as a person? Finally, how do I feel after seeing the friend in question: Lifted or drained? Isla Pearl’s take on Wakeman’s equation is smart and her conclusion clear: “Ditch the drama and put your time and energy into those who deserve it the most.”
Chris Grimm, writing for the blog Self Stairway, has a simpler equation. He says great friendships are born of being social, being of value, and respecting boundaries, ie. don’t be late for friends, talk over them, sleep with their love interests, or otherwise piss in their cornflakes.
Author Shasta Nelson’s friendship formula is Connect3 Experience3 Share3, and works more like a suggested to-do list for moments of connection with friends. She notes that, “it is essential that we engage consistently, connect positively and show our vulnerability so that we create nurtured, meaningful friendships. I hope the ‘Friendship Formula’ shows the really simple steps it takes to make a big difference.”
All of the above have something to teach us, but the grand poobah of friendship equations, the most frequently cited, and the one that my colleagues and I keep coming back to in our work developing a digital relationship assistant, was authored by Jack Schafer.
Schafer spent much of his professional life as an FBI agent working in a counterintelligence behavioral analysis unit, trying to understand how to build sufficient trust in a relationship to turn a foreign national into a U.S. spy! In the first chapter of his book The Like Switch: An FBI Agent’s Guide To Influencing, Attracting And Winning People Over, Schafer explains that the critical components of friendship are proximity, frequency, duration and intensity.
Proximity is simply your distance from the other person; frequency, the number of times you see them; duration, how long you see them for; and intensity is the quality of your interactions. The latter is measured in whether you have intellectually and emotionally stimulating conversation, make strong verbal and nonverbal connections, make each other laugh, and so on.
It’s not obviously foundation-shaking stuff, yet Schafer’s thinking left me with a little brain splinter that seems to be having a positive effect on the way I interact with my friends.
I have long been susceptible, as I guess many are, to recency and proximity biases when it comes to friendship. Rather than taking time out of busy days to think about who I most want to see, (or need to see because it has been too long), I typically turn to friends in the immediate vicinity — a colleague I’ll enjoy chatting to over a drink after work being the most obvious example. That isn’t bad per se, it’s the way I’ve bonded with at least four or five friends who I care for deeply. But decades of skewing towards the proximate has without doubt cost me closeness with others who mattered to me, but were less immediately present. Time without contact, as all the equations suggest, causes friendship to atrophy.
Reading Schafer’s equation heightened my awareness of the role that proximity was playing in my relationships. It also suggested a way of counteracting distance by dialing up the other friendship factors, frequency, duration and, particularly, intensity.
Duration and frequency can be a challenge in the modern world of friendship. Many of us move cities, states or even countries for college, then do it again for a job, and then another job, or for love, or simply the desire for a different life. As researchers who’ve looked into the well-documented increase in loneliness among millennials have observed, such changes often precipitate feelings of isolation and friendlessness.
As someone who moved across the Atlantic in my twenties, I am keenly aware that distance — and the time zones that go with it — creates a barrier to maintaining strong relationships. The positive thing about being an ocean apart from old friends and family members, is that when you do see each other you tend to try to make it count — spending a whole day together, for example, rather than just grabbing a drink. But the interlude between those days can be months or years.
Since internalizing Schafer’s thinking I’ve tried to increase the frequency of contact with those friends and family members who live overseas or in other U.S. cities. I’ve even overcome my distaste for phone and video chat so that those moments of connection are synchronous (as opposed to my email/text default) and have a chance of being more meaningful.
Perhaps most significantly, I’ve given more thought to the intensity of those moments of connection.
For some dialing up intensity might mean asking deeper, more probing questions. For me it has simply meant listening more carefully, remembering a couple of interesting things that were said, and bringing those things back up in the next conversation. Doing so: a) demonstrates that you heard them; b) shows that you cared enough to remember the conversation, and; c) skips the small talk and gets right back into the meat of something that was clearly important to them and interesting to you.
For some people this kind of behavior is likely such second nature that, if they’re somehow still reading this, they’re likely feeling contempt for the 46-year-old dude who just realized he needs to remember what his friends said in their last conversation. That’s entirely fair; I will just say in my defense that I always knew that I should remember, the problem was that I couldn’t. So now I write a note or two about the conversation I just had. Simple, but it’s made a difference in the extent to which I feel connected to some of the people I care about but see only infrequently.
And — surprise! — when I’ve asked people who I think of as good at remembering stuff about me, they’ve said they sometimes take notes too. They didn’t need a relationship equation to prompt them to do so. But I did, and I imagine a few others out there could benefit from thinking about these friendship formulae too.
Now, about that Sagittarius we’re looking to hire…
