Does geography matter for new friendships?

You might have experienced that you find yourself losing touch with some of your old friends every time you move. You're unable to maintain the great relations you had when you lived closer and can't seem to find the time or opportunity to keep interacting with them the way you used to.

While many indicators of success in a friendship lie in a person's traits and interests, another key is geographical closeness. The closer you are, the more likely you will interact with someone. The more you interact, the more likely you are to establish friendships. In a study executed at Norwegian School of Economics studying the users of Venn: the friend app, it was found that 20 minutes were the threshold for how far they were willing to travel to establish a friendship.

Moving often requires that you develop new friendships. In a world where meeting new people has gotten even harder with fewer safe spaces to meet like-minded people, where keeping a distance to new people has become a norm, we need new ways to meet those close to us. While virtual friendships are a possible solution, it does not replace the physical closeness we need to maintain our close friendships or establish new ones.

Many users of digital platforms are people who recently moved and are looking for new friends in the area where they live. Venn provides you with a different way of meeting friends in your area and facilitates for you to create more meaningful friendships when you've moved toa new location and don't know where to get started.

We need to foster the combination of virtual and physical meetings as key to meeting new friends and maintaining them. While you can get acquainted with someone through digital spaces, like Venn, it's the physical meeting that will seal the friendship.

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