How Shared Activities Create Deeper Bonds Than Conversation
The best friendships often form with very little direct conversation about personal subjects. Doing things together works differently — and often better.
FirstMove Team
23 November 2025 · 7 min read
The assumption underlying most advice about deepening relationships is that it happens through conversation — specifically through self-disclosure, the sharing of personal information and emotional content. This model is not wrong, but it's incomplete. Research on how bonding actually occurs suggests that shared activities often create deeper and more durable connections than conversation, particularly in early-stage relationships.
This matters practically, because it suggests that the most effective approach to friendship formation is often to find something to do together rather than to get to know each other through organised conversation. The activity is not merely the backdrop to the friendship — it's often the mechanism.
Parallel Play in Adults
Developmental psychologists describe a phenomenon in children called "parallel play" — the tendency of young children to play alongside other children rather than interacting directly, apparently content with proximity and shared activity rather than direct engagement. This is often treated as a precursor to more mature social interaction, with the implication that parallel play is something you grow out of.
The research on adult bonding suggests this is wrong. Adults engage in something functionally similar to parallel play all the time, and it appears to be an important bonding mechanism. Walking side by side, working on a shared project, attending an event together, playing a sport — these create connection through shared experience and proximity without requiring direct emotional disclosure.
The psychological mechanism appears to be related to what's called "synchronized experience" — the mild emotional mirroring that occurs when people share an experience simultaneously. Studies of people who watch the same film, experience the same surprise, or perform the same physical activity at the same time show elevated feelings of connection and liking compared to people who experience these things separately or asynchronously.
Why Doing Works Better Than Talking (Sometimes)
Conversation about personal subjects has a specific social cost that activity does not: it requires managing your own disclosure and the other person's reaction to it simultaneously. This cognitive and social load is part of why self-disclosure is anxiety-provoking, particularly for people who are new to each other.
Activity sidesteps much of this. When two people are focused on the same thing — beating a running route, following a class, watching a band — the social pressure is oriented outward rather than inward. Conversation happens incidentally and in short bursts rather than as a sustained, self-referential exchange. The shared external focus makes conversation easier rather than harder.
Research on "shoulder-to-shoulder" versus "face-to-face" conversations consistently finds that many people — particularly but not exclusively men — find it easier to discuss personally meaningful subjects when they're engaged in an activity together (driving, walking, cooking) than when they're sitting directly opposite each other. The activity reduces the intensity of direct scrutiny.
What This Means for Friendship Building
The practical implication is that the activity-first approach to adult friendship formation is not just a convenient workaround for people who find explicit socialising uncomfortable. It's a well-supported mechanism for bonding that often outperforms the deliberate, conversation-based approach.
Consistent with this, research by Jeffrey Hall found that friendships that formed in activity contexts (sports clubs, hobby groups, shared projects) were more durable over a two-year period than friendships formed primarily through conversation-based socialising. The activity provided both a reliable source of repeated contact and a shared experience base that conversation alone can't replicate.
This suggests that if you want to make friends, your best move is often to find an activity you genuinely enjoy and do it with people, regularly. Not to manufacture deep conversations. Not to force self-disclosure. Just to do something real alongside other people, repeatedly, and let the friendship form in the spaces between.
What Shared Activities Can't Do
Activity-based bonding has limits. Friendships that remain entirely activity-based can become dependent on the activity for their survival — when the football team dissolves, the friendships often dissolve too, because there's nothing else holding them together. The most durable friendships use activity as the mechanism of formation and then develop conversational depth on top of it.
The sequence that research suggests works best: shared activity first (which creates familiarity and mild bonding); incidental conversation during activities (which creates the conditions for deeper disclosure); deliberate one-on-one contact once familiarity is established (which creates the depth that pure activity can't). Activity alone won't get you to close friendship. But it's often the best starting point.