Can You Be Close Friends With Someone You Don’t Have Much in Common With?

it’s not about having the starting place; it’s about going through life together

If you were a millennial with internet access in the 2000s, there’s a pretty good chance you spent more time than you’d like to admit taking BlogThings quizzes like, "What kind of toaster are you?" And, "What does your

For me, it was also the era of copying and pasting questionnaires into Xanga, LiveJournal, and MySpace. Fifty questions that, looking back, seem remarkably well suited to answering every security question on your bank account.

Coke or Pepsi?

Chocolate or vanilla?

Dogs or cats?

Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network?

And on and on until my mom needed me to get off the computer because someone was going to call the landline. (Ahhh, different times.)

Underneath it all, this assumption that the way I was going to make friends— the way to really nail this whole socializing “thing”— was to find people with as much in common with me as possible.

And hey, we did talk about why we’re more likely to like each other’s friends recently. There’s plenty to support the common sense notion that if we’re more alike, we’ll get along better. We’ll be closer because some of the connecting work is already done.

Shared interests/hobbies, similar backgrounds, or comparable work and family lives do offer points to connect and go deeper with people.

But all that said: we can and, I would add, should work to be close with people we don’t have much in common with.

The benefits

Expanding and deepening with people who have a different experience of the world and who are into different things allows us to keep growing, keep practicing presence, and give us new opportunities to do and learn things we wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

I’ve found it particularly valuable in my own life to make friends across generations. My youngest friends are 10 years younger than me and oldest friends are about 45 years older than me. Especially among my older friends, we have really different points of reference, physical abilities, and interests.

This means I have direct access to people who can answer questions on topics I know nothing about, offer memories of things I wasn’t alive to experience, and have skills that super help me out when I’m in a jam (shout out to the friend who has oriented me to how wills work in our state).

I have friends who are all about things I haven’t the foggiest connection to (music theory, the leather scene, or horror movies), but we are close because we’ve found that our differences keep our connection exciting, rather than diminishing it.

So how?

Ask about their experience, especially when you don’t know much about the subject.

“What got you into that?” gives someone a different invitation than “What is that?”

Both are useful questions, but the first lets them tell you something about themselves. You don’t need enough expertise to have an impressive conversation about their interest. Curiosity gives you somewhere to begin.

Let them get to know you, too.

It’s easy to turn curiosity into an interview, particularly when someone’s life is very different from yours. Give them something to respond to.

You might say, “I’ve never tried that, but I recognize what you mean about wanting something outside work that feels like yours.”

Or you might not recognize their experience at all. “That’s really different from how I’ve felt about it” can lead somewhere interesting, too, if you leave space to hear each other.

Notice how you feel around them.

Do you enjoy talking? Can you admit you don’t know something without feeling embarrassed? Are they interested in your life, too?

Having different hobbies is one thing. Feeling dismissed or having to defend who you are is another. You’re allowed to want kindness, respect, and some shared expectations about how you treat each other.

There’s no obligation to make a friendship work just because someone has a different perspective.

Let the friendship take the shape that works for both of you.

Maybe you won’t be the friends who spend every weekend together or text each other every passing thought. But you might be the friends who grab tea once a month and trade notes on your very different lives, and both look forward to it. There’s room for that to be a close, meaningful friendship without needing to turn it into something else. Pay attention to what you both enjoy about spending time together, and give yourselves permission to keep doing that.

Give yourselves something to share.

A walk, a regular phone call, or lunch every few weeks can give a friendship somewhere to grow. Choose something you both enjoy enough to do again.

Over time, you have more to return to: the story they promised to finish, the decision you wanted their opinion on, the ridiculous thing that happened the last time you hung out.

You’re building a shared history, even if you arrived with very different ones.

Eventually, “we don’t have much in common” might still be true about your hobbies. But you also know what’s been worrying them lately. They remember to ask how your difficult conversation went. A joke from three months ago is still making both of you laugh.

That’s quite a lot to have together, even if one of you picked Pepsi.