On shared experiences.

People.  With the exception of hermits and software developers, having people in your life is an inevitability.  Every new job, every new city you move to, every cool little bar you just found in your neighborhood is full of them.  The damn world is lousy with them.  Other people inform our actions and decisions in thousands of indescribable ways.  What we wear, how we eat, the ways we communicate are all formed by the people in the world around us.

Some of which we try to keep around on a regular basis.  Maybe it's for the satisfaction of having people we're close to.  Maybe it's just so we don't have to meet new people every day, since it gets exhausting after a while.  And while there's a lot of reading material out there about how to meet new people and how to maintain interpersonal relationships, I haven't heard much about that magically inelegant in-between stage.  You know what I'm talking about.  When you've established that you'd like to keep talking to someone, but you're not quite at that comfortable silence phase.  Between remembering their name and remembering their address is a nebulous, murky, disjointed realm of awkward conversation starters and cliched icebreakers.  But what else are you supposed to do?  Talk about yourself?  Are you really ready for that?

Enter the shared experience.  I feel like this concept doesn't get nearly as much play time as it should.  The idea is simple enough: be around each other while something happens.  Maybe it's a movie neither of you have seen before.  Or an art exhibit that just came into town.  Regardless, after a new experience, you've got all kinds of new ideas floating around, waiting to be vocalized.  Why not vocalize at each other?  Did you feel the same thing they did?  Why or why not?

Or maybe you want to take it one step further and share something they've never tried that you have.  It puts the you in the driver's seat, forging a bond through guidance.  You get to experience second-hand what it's like to see something again for the first time.  You get to see if their first instincts match yours, if they felt the same awe or disgust or contentment you did when you first experienced it.  And it's safe, because you're not sharing just yourself, you're sharing something that exists outside of the two of you, tempered by your own perceptions.

Because ultimately, that's what interacting with other humans is - it's sharing.  Whether it's a cup of coffee at the corner cafe or an exceptionally long red light at an intersection, you're laying the groundwork of a relationship by creating something in common.

And that's the important part.  So next time you find yourself in that weird, vague phase between acquaintance and friend, don't wrack your brain trying to do something you think they'd enjoy.  Just go do something.  And make sure you talk about it afterwards.