An interesting way to build a close friendship is to find what I call an ‘Activity-Interest’ for both/all parties.

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The definition is literal. Two people have an activity-interest if they engage in an interesting recurring recreation for a period of time.

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Before we delve into Activity-Interests, let us start from a common standpoint. In a lot of cases, friendships originate from the environment people find themselves in. Many of your friends are probably from school, university, your workplace and so on. More times than not, friendships are coincidental and not actively intentional.

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That is, “we happen to be in the same place at the same time for a recurring period of time so I became your friend.”

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Other factors apply of-course, such as commonalities, connection and type of person. Compatibility if you will. You’re not going to be genuine friends with someone if they treat you like crap even if the environment is awesome.

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In several situations, the environment-based method works and provides the catalyst required for a close friendship. A good way to litmus test this, is to track how often you keep in touch with your friend once the environment the friendship is predicated on changes. E.g. If you’re used to seeing your best friend at school every day, but had to move to a different location, how often would you still keep in touch?

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Due to its happenstance method, environment-based friendships are no longer enough in today’s world and I will illustrate how Activity-Interests replaces this to build stronger friendship bonds. If you meet a cool person at an event who also happens to have a good connection or vibe with you, then it is useful to find an activity-interest both of you can engage in to keep the friendship going.

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To recap, you engage in an activity-interest with your friend by partaking in a common recurring activity for a period of time. For example: Going to the same gym class weekly, playing video games every other day or preoccupying yourself with tabletop games every fortnight.

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The corollary to this is dating. If you connect with someone you like/fancy and it turns out the feeling is mutual, the immediate homework is to find an activity-interest for the both of you as quickly as possible. While of course still flirting, that’s why it’s homework and not the real work. In the initial stages, liking someone can be strong enough to power you through for a brief period of time. Emotions are crazy that way. But it wanes. It is possible for you to like someone with no common interests but how long can this last for?

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The best kind of activity-interests do not require a physical presence because there’s only so much one can do physically [1].

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There are countless ways to build Activity-Interests. A good way to start is to look for what you’re interested in now and match it with friends who have similar interests. The key is to make it a recurring activity.

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I have friendship bonds predicated on football. Sure, we talk about other stuff besides football like life issues, but what brings us together are the football matches occurring regularly for us to keep in touch.

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The couple next door to me garden every weekend without fail. It is an activity-interest that allows them to be closer, even as they recently became parents which often increases distraction.

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I often watch rap battles (e.g. Smack’s urltv) — a genre of rap that seems to have endless content. They pop up on YouTube regularly enough for it to be an activity-interest with a friend of mine. Sure we talk about other stuff but this enables that.

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One last thing to note is: finding a mutual activity-interest may require some work but the activity-interests themselves will not feel like effort. You are actually interested in a particular activity that occurs often enough. The only bit of work is sharing that with someone you like who is also interested.

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It helps if you have multiple activity-interests, but it requires some effort to find or create it and most people don’t. In the end, most friendships don’t die because you stopped liking the person (barring conflict), they die because you either changed environments or your activity-interest was halted. Or both.

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The idea of Activity-Interest friendships raises other questions though. For example: What happens if you grow out of an interest? I.e. you become bored. Every aspect of your life has phases including your interests. So what happens when your interests go out of sync with your friend? I.e. one person becomes bored before the other. I think I partly answered this with: multiple activity-interests.