What proximity does to encounters
The best-established factor in attraction is neither charm nor affinity: it is the probability of crossing paths. A result from 1950 that seventy-five years have not refuted.
The Westgate study
In 1950, Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter and Kurt Back studied the ties formed in a student residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They had a rare piece of luck: housing had been allocated independently of the people, which approximates the conditions of an experiment.
The result is clear-cut and unflattering to self-regard. The distance between two doors predicts declared friendships far better than any measured affinity. Living at the foot of a staircase or near the mailboxes multiplies ties, because those positions multiply the occasions to cross paths.
Habit makes things likeable
A second mechanism is added to the first. In 1968, Robert Zajonc established that repeated exposure to a neutral stimulus increases how much one likes it. He obtained this with faces, invented words, ideograms, and the effect appears even when the exposures go unnoticed.
This result ranks among the most replicated in experimental psychology. It has a limit: the effect fades then reverses beyond a certain number of exposures, and it does not apply in the same way to what was disliked at the outset.
The sequence
Put end to end, these two results describe a banal sequence. We regularly cross paths with a small number of people, repetition makes them more agreeable, and that familiarity is then interpreted as a particular affinity.
The sense of obviousness can therefore be produced by frequency, without any rare property of the other coming into play. This observation takes nothing away from what follows: it concerns making contact, not the relationship.
What the apps change
Dating services genuinely change something, by widening the pool well beyond geography. They do not remove the other mechanisms for all that: they replace physical proximity with exposure organised by an algorithm.
A review published in 2012 by Eli Finkel and colleagues concludes, moreover, that nothing establishes the superiority of matching algorithms over cruder matching, for lack of predictive data available before the encounter. What these services bring has to do with access, not selection.
The scope of the result
All of this bears on the first minutes or the first weeks. A study conducted in 2020 by Samantha Joel and many colleagues, on more than ten thousand couples, reaches a harsh conclusion for the field: what we know about people before the relationship explains very little of subsequent satisfaction.
The reasonable use of this work is therefore reflexive rather than operational. It does not say where to go looking; it reminds us that the sense of obviousness is not a reliable instrument for measuring the person in front of us.
Key points
Functional proximity, that is, the probability of crossing paths, predicts ties better than declared affinities.
The mere repetition of an exposure increases liking, without our being aware of it: familiarity is easily confused with affinity.
These mechanisms concern initial attraction; what determines satisfaction in a relationship plays out inside it.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
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