What's the real glue behind friendships?

I could not be more different from my closest friends. And I don't just mean that we could never share shoes or jeans. We like doing different things. We read different books. We majored in different fields, work in different industries, live in different cities. Some of us weren't even born in the same country.

When I actually sit down and count, there's a lot more separating us than connecting us. And yet. These friendships have survived disagreements, years apart, graduations, moves, whole different chapters of our lives.

This isn't an anomaly. You've definitely looked at two friends and thought, how are you two even friends? The reverse happens too. Some of the closest friends I know are so alike you could swap their names and nobody would notice.

Which makes me think being very similar might not actually be the thing that keeps a friendship going. That bugs me a little, because I've always been more of a birds-of-a-feather person than an opposites-attract person. And psychology backs me up on that. The similarity-attraction effect says we're drawn to people we see as being like us.

So what's going on?

Thinking differently about friendships

I read an article recently by Laura Bilbao, a research neuroscientist, about a new study looking at whether similarity is really what makes friendships work.

Researchers took 371 four-person friend groups and had them rate their own and each other's personalities across the Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability.

Two things stood out.

Friends barely resembled each other. The similarity wasn't significant. And how similar they were didn't predict how happy they were in the friendship at all. Bilbao's take is that friendship was never really about sameness. What matters more is whether someone is agreeable, steady, and just feels good to be around.

I think it goes deeper than that. Friendship, at its core, is co-witnessing. It's the experiencing of life together and the making of shared moments out of it.

Think about it this way. If I asked you right now what comes to mind about your closest friend, you wouldn't list their personality traits. You'd go straight to the memories.

A movie night. A terrible exam. A good grade, a bad grade. A trip. A birthday. A crazy night out. Cooking together. Driving somewhere with the music way too loud. The night after a bad breakup.

Maybe what we actually have in common isn't what we like or want or do. It's what we've lived through side by side.

The lesson

Similarity might be what draws you toward someone in the first place. It's rarely what keeps you there.

What keeps you there is a life witnessed together.

Which makes going out and actually making the memories more important than ever, and honestly harder than ever. Adulthood is busy. Between work and school and everything at home, our friendships are usually the first thing to quietly slip.

So send the text. Make the plan. Go out for drinks. Have the call. Catch the movie. Host the dinner.

Make the time for the people who matter.

Why Centr?

We know how hard it is to get from "we should really hang out" to actually being in the same room. Life is genuinely an expert at getting in the way.

That's what Centr is for. Let us handle the details so you can focus on the part that counts.

Centr helps you remember. The big moments and the small ones. Set a goal for how often you want to see someone and we'll help you stay on track. Centr helps you plan. No more twelve-text spirals about where and when. It all lives in one place. Centr helps you recharge. Keep track of which people and activities fill you up and which ones leave you flat.

Managing your relationships deserves real time and attention. Centr can carry some of the weight.