Paul Eastwick

If you are dating, there is real wisdom in looking up what is in your area that is an intramural sports league, an improv class, a cooking class, any kind of class you might want to take, any kind of interest, where – and this is important –

You would get to interact with the same people on multiple occasions because that is an environment that pulls for less of this market-based winner-take-all, the hot people dominate, all the right swipes.

Because when we get to know each other in person, we start disagreeing about who we'd want to date.

And for many of us, that's a good thing.

That means that somebody is going to think you're especially desirable in that smaller group if you give them enough time.

Yes.

I mean, it seems so obvious and yet I think we still underestimate it.

The pull of proximity.

I mean, this is a study that I love citing.

It was conducted several years ago, but it showed that if somebody is randomly assigned to sit next to you in a classroom, you are 20 times more likely to be friends with that person than anybody else in that same classroom.

20 times is enormous.

These proximity effects really matter.

So of course, if we're like shooting a bunch of scenes together together,

You know, director keeps telling us to do it again.

We're going to develop not only a familiarity with each other, but also a set of in-jokes, a set of rituals.

You know, the eye roll that we give for the 20th take of this, you know, very short piece of dialogue that the director wants us to keep doing.

And this is how people connect with each other.

When we aren't interacting with the same people repeatedly in person, we are missing all of this.

Yeah, this is how we think about it, that it's something that two people are building.

It's a lot of that, like in jokes, rituals, stories and patterns kind of stuff.