Are you only friends with people like you?

In my experience, eating fish and chips at the seaside can be a life threatening experience. Not because of the quality of the fish and chips, but because of the flocks of birds trying to eat it at the same time.

On one memorable trip, I was in the process of trying to rescue my daughter's meal from a veracious seagull, when its partner in crime took the opportunity to swipe mine. I think they must have enjoyed it, because a few minutes later they deposited most of what they had digested on my head. In His wisdom, the Lord has ordained that trips to the beach would remind me of that old adage: birds of a feather, flock together.

The saying doesn't just apply to birds though. People tend to stick to those who are like them too. In other words, our circle of friends tend to be made up of people who are similar to us. This is well documented and true across many dimensions. According to one sociologist, Miller McPherson, the most significant divide is ethnicity, followed by age, religion, education and occupation, in roughly that order. So how do we begin to move towards difference when our instincts drive us towards similarity? 

Going against your instincts

For me, life in my extended mixed ethnicity family has been a training school for cross-cultural relationships. The relationships are more stable than other chance encounters or casual friendships. We have a vested interest in maintaining them and we have built in rhythms of encounter, like birthdays and holidays. The strongest predictor of the strength of a relational tie, is the effort required to sustain it. This is often connected to geographical distance (even in the internet age).

So families, workplaces and clubs that we visit regularly provide a stable space for relationships to grow. They are places where it most naturally makes sense to make a consistent effort. In fact workplaces and clubs generally provide the most interaction between different ethnic groups that most people experience in everyday life.

I wouldn't naturally connect with all of the people in my extended family, but we have to relate periodically. The blessing of this is that, over time it becomes clear that underneath the differences, lies lots that actually is similar: we all age, get angry, appreciate attention and have to adapt to what life throws at us. In other words, we're all made in the image of God. As we do life together, even in fairly mundane ways, this has become clearer and my affections dearer. It all makes it emotionally easier to persist in getting to know people. 

None of this makes it easy, but starting with a group we are already engaged in can be the most realistic as a first step in our growth in relating across cultures. How wonderful if this is our church? But if we really struggle to find diversity in it, could work or clubs be an option? 

One concrete thing that’s helped me is focussed activity. One of my in-laws is really into chess. Although I can play it's not my favourite pastime. It stresses me out. But by saying yes to his invitations to a game more frequently, we've been able to grow our relationship. I’m struck how over a few months our conversations have become much deeper and richer. I'm not sure we'd have gotten there from a series of more unsettled and stilted conversations in a kitchen or corridor. 

In short, framing reality and picking a specific activity can help us on our way. We’re more similar than we think and focussing on a task together can facilitate friendship. I’m still pretty bad at chess though.