Propinquity Effect
you don't fall for the best person. you fall for the closest one.
Grounded in the research on Wikipedia: Propinquity (Festinger, Schachter & Back, 1950 Westgate housing study)
[ ] what it actually is
Propinquity is the boring truth behind most of your friendships: people bond with whoever is physically near, seen often, and easy to bump into. Not the funniest, smartest, or hottest person in the room. The closest one. Proximity plus repeated exposure quietly does the work your ego likes to credit to chemistry. Distance is the real filter on who you end up close to.
[ ] the real science
Festinger, Schachter and Back (1950) tracked friendships in an MIT student housing complex called Westgate. Where you lived basically predicted who you'd befriend. Next-door neighbors became close; people two doors down, way less. Folks near stairwells and mailboxes had the most friends, purely from foot traffic. They called it 'functional distance' which is paths crossing, not feet apart. Architecture wrote the social graph.