The geography of friendship
Some people claim that friendship can withstand long spells of not being in touch. Those people obviously have no idea (and no friends). If you can’t spare the effort, it’s nothing short of insulting to resort to the baseless notion that friendship transcends time and space. It’s a lame excuse by lazy people that doesn’t even warrant consideration. If someone tells you so, cut them loose.
Some people claim that geography doesn’t matter. In an op-ed piece in today’s FT, Niklas Zennström, the co-founder of Skype and venture capitalist, asserts that “we have the wrong obsession with geography. Today, the simple truth is that great companies can come from anywhere”. That’s certainly true for business and technology in particular. However, it doesn’t hold for friendship: geography matters, big time.
Case in point: Barack Obama. Apparently he (“the paragon of reserve bordering on the arctic” according to Bloomberg columnist Margaret Carlson) doesn’t like to schmooze with politicians on Capitol Hill. Instead, he has a bunch of close friends from prep-school he reunites with each time he visits his native Hawaii. That’s good for Obama, the individual, but bad for Obama, the president. It also makes him an exception, not only as a politician but as an American. Again: geography matters when it comes to friendship.
I only started to realize this when I moved to the United States. Growing up in Switzerland, you develop very strong bonds with the kids you meet along the way. You go to kindergarten in your neighborhood, likely moving on to a nearby elementary school, then to high school in the same school district. By the time you graduate, there’s a good chance that you have spent the past 12 years with at least a handful of the same people. If not, you’ll know where to find them, unless they’ve fallen into a sinkhole (metaphorical or otherwise). University is where people start to go their separate ways, but even there, paths continue to cross.
First of all, there’s only twelve universities. Depending on the degree you’re pursuing, that choice is reduced to two or three. But given the peer group you hung out with in high school, there might not even be a real choice, as you select your university based on where and what your friends study. It’s all very monocultural. But it reinforces lasting friendships and organically forges new ones.
In the US, things are much less stable. Young families move around domestically because of career opportunities and job mobility. As a result, kids tend to switch schools more often. The real watershed moment though is college. Students flock to their school of choice from all across the country. That’s where the tightest social relationships tend to be made. The reason is obvious: the vast expanse of the country is suddenly substituted by a campus the size of a few football fields that becomes the students’ center of gravity for four years. This local concentration creates an incredible sense of community and, I would argue, loyalty. After graduation, people again disperse across the country (or the world).
Take Obama: he grew up in Hawaii and Seattle, moved to LA and then to New York for college. He worked in Chicago, attended Law School in Boston, moved back to Chicago and finally ended up in Washington. The fact that he stays in touch with the “choom gang” of his teenage years is testament to the value he accords to his early friendships.
Switzerland is small, the US is huge, it’s a simple as that. It makes a difference socially if you get uprooted as a 10 year old by moving from Connecticut to Alabama. It makes another difference if you have to travel 3000 miles to college rather than 100 kilometers. Geography is deterministic in that way. It affects the relationships you build, when you build them and how you maintain them. There’s no statistic for it, but I bet the average length of a Swiss thirty year old’s friendships is twice as long as that of his US peers. Which doesn’t mean those friendships don’t have to be cultivated just as thoroughly.