I'd Rather Have Four Quarters Than One Hundred Pennies

Maybe it's just me, but sometimes it seems like forming new, genuine friendships peaked in the sandbox and only gets harder the older you get. Or maybe that's just women. Occasionally though, you get lucky and meet someone that you instantly click with and your husbands joke that they can't tell your personalities apart. 
While Oxford Dictionary defines friendship as a relationship of mutual affection between two or more people, there's a little more breadth and depth than that. C.S. Lewis wrote that "Friendship is born at the exact moment one person says to another: 'What! You, too? I thought I was the only one!'" Turns out he was not the only one, because Plato wrote, "Similarity begets friendship" in his play, Phaedrus, which was written in 360 B.C. Aristotle also had the same idea, penning, "Some define it as a matter of similarity; they say that we love those who are like ourselves." How and why we make the friends we have has long been a subject of study in social psychology, and though the dynamics of friendship remain mysterious and unquantifiable, new research shows that the dance of new friendship is nuanced and far more complex that commonly thought. In an age dominated by social media, where you can "friend" someone without really being their friend, or even liking them for that matter, how do you form substantial friendships? 
While it is true that opposites can and do attract, more often than not birds of a feather flock together, meaning that we naturally gravitate towards people who have similar attitudes, values, interests, backgrounds, personalities and levels of attractiveness as ourselves. Sociologists and psychologists have been able to delineate the forces that attract and bind friends to each other, beginning from acquaintance to friend and elevating that friend to the coveted "best" position. 
1. Proximity In this context, proximity simply means how often people come in contact. Years ago, researchers conducted a study in which they followed the friendships in an apartment building. People tended to be friends with the neighbors on their respective floors, whereas friendship was least likely between someone on the first floor and someone on the second floor. However, those on the ground floor, near mailboxes and stairways, had friends on multiple floors. As the study suggests, friends are often those with whom we cross paths with regularity, such as coworkers, classmates, or people we bump into at the gym. Fortunately for me, as my two best friends live in North Carolina and Idaho, studies have shown that once a close friendship has been established, proximity has little effect on the ability to maintain a friendship. For instance, moving out of state is not the friendship death knell it once was, thanks largely to the web. 
2. Common Interests Why do we end up chatting with one person in our yoga class versus another? This answer is fairly self-evident: our friend-in-the-making loves Jane Austen, as do we, or is also still unabashedly in love with Disney World. They laugh at our jokes, and we laugh at theirs. In short, we have things in common.
3. History Nothing ties two people together, even people with little else in common, quite like having gone through the same difficult experience. Take, for instance, former members of breast cancer support groups whose diseases have been cured. Though the women no longer have breast cancer, their social identity as survivors often remains so powerful that their primary friendships are with other survivors because they can understand what they've gone through. Other major life events may include marriage, parenthood, or divorce. 
4. Common Values While sharing the same morals, values, and religious beliefs may not necessarily be enough to create a friendship on its own, if two people's core values are too divergent it may be difficult for their friendship to thrive. 
5. Personal Characteristics We tend to particularly like individuals who have admirable personality characteristics. As you may suspect, people most like those who exude positive characteristics, such as kindness, dependability, and trustworthiness, while disliking people with characteristics such as dishonesty, insincerity, and lack of personal warmth. Conversely, people who seem overly competent, or too perfect can make peers feel uncomfortable, while small mistakes make a person seem more human and therefore more likable. 
6. Equality In a true friendship, it stands to reason that there are going to be instances when you will lean on one another in times of hardship and difficulty. However, there must be balance. If one friend constantly needs the support of the other, such that the person being depended upon receives no benefit other than the opportunity to support and encourage, while the relationship indeed may be valuable, it can't be said to be a true friendship.
In essence, in this age of "collecting" friends on Facebook, finding authentic friendships is much more difficult than meets the eye. I myself have 580 "friends" on social media, but when it comes down to it I really have a handful of close friends I go on coffee-dates and catch up with and, aside from my husband, three very dear best friends. And I'm more than ok with that. As they say, quality over quantity, and I'd rather have four quarters than one hundred pennies. 
While the items I've listed above are really only the tip of the friendship iceberg, it's easy to see just how much goes into finding our kindred spirits. And while it's not necessarily an easy task, once you do find these people, they're like priceless gems. They're like coming home.