Propinquity

Propinquity is also one of the factors, set out by Jeremy Bentham, used to measure the amount of (utilitarian) pleasure in a method known as felicific calculus.

It was first theorized by psychologists Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back in what came to be called the Westgate studies conducted at MIT (1950).

If the resident has repeatedly negative experiences with a person then the propinquity effect has a far less chance of happening (Norton, Frost, & Ariely, 2007).

This study showed that there were certain people with whom these women became friends much more easily than others, such as classmates, workplace colleagues, and neighbours as a result of shared interests, common situations, and constant interaction.

Having slightly older children participating in activities such as school clubs and teams also allowed social networks to widen, giving the women a stronger support base, emotional or otherwise.

[8] However, research that came after the development of the internet and email has shown that physical distance is still a powerful predictor of contact, interaction, friendship, and influence.

For by the sacred radiance of the sun, The mysteries of Hecate and the night, By all the operation of the orbs From whom we do exist and cease to be— Here I disclaim all my paternal care, Propinquity, and property of blood, And as a stranger to my heart and me Hold thee from this for ever.

The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighbored, pitied, and relieved As thou my sometime daughter.'

In William Faulkner's 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom!, Rosa, in explaining to Quentin why she agreed to marry Sutpen, states, "I don't plead propinquity: the fact that I, a woman young and at the age for marrying and in a time when most of the young men whom I would have known ordinarily were dead on lost battlefields, that I lived for two years under the same roof with him."

[10] In the P. G. Wodehouse novel Right Ho, Jeeves, Bertie asks, "What do you call it when two people of opposite sexes are bunged together in close association in a secluded spot meeting each other every day and seeing a lot of each other?"