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As a secretary in the public safety realm, I tend to meet others in that same realm. For instance the trainings that I attend effect people in the same or similar field. Ex: NIBRS training in Augusta brought me together (me from Bridgton and others from all parts of the state) to learn about this particular subject that effects us all. I think that it's our similar job field that brought us together as I would not have met many of them had it not been for the connection through this class.

Libra

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Although the only thing my wife have and I have in common is that we were married on the same day, I think our social tie reflects homophily.  We first met while I was stationed up here and she was from a neighboring small town.  Our chance of meeting each other was dictated by the close proximity and the small town in which we met and our similar interest in listening to music and shooting pool.  While location may have played a major part in our first encounter, I believe that our work ethics, education level, and social values, and trust enabled us to remain married and form a relationship that is going into our 30th year.  Despite our difference in age and where we are from, I think that we shared enough similar interests and had the opportunity to meet, through homophily and I am grateful for this social science principle.

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My story is a reflection of Homophily.  I was born in a small town which also had a small school district , so all 5yr olds in the community were in the same kindergarten class. Right away I found a group of friends to play with. The six of us formed a bond because we liked to play the same games and were all really good at jumprope! For the next three years we attended each other's birthday parties and spent lots of time playing at each other's homes. Tragically, when I turned eight years old, my mom was killed in a car accident.  My father moved us away from the little town and my friends. Over the years, I grew up, went to college and had a family of my own and settled into another small town. Years passed and then one day I received a message on Facebook asking me if I wanted to be "friends" with another woman who looked faintly familiar to me. Once we were able to chat, I found out that she was one of the friends I had made in kindergarten all those years before! Our newfound friendship fell into place with no effort..she invited me to her upcoming high school reunion and I was able to go and reconnect with all my friends from my kindergarten class.  I did not know about or recognize Homophily at the time but it occurred to me that we all grew up to be super similar women!! We all worked in the helping occupations like teaching and nursing; we all had similar size families; we all liked to stay in shape, and the list goes on and on. Even though I hadn't seen or heard from these childhood friends in many years, we have been able to pick up where we left off because Homophily was definitely at play in our little group all those years ago!  PS: I am the little girl peeking over the top of my chair!  :)

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My story is actually about my current relationship. I think it has both Homphily, and Heterophily. My boyfriend Jeremy and I have known each other for over 10 years. I am about 9 years younger than him so I always hung with a different crowd, but both of our friend groups had connections from other people so we would often be at the same events and parties. It was a mixed age group ranging from 18-30. I always thought he hated me because he was so much older and cooler and I was an annoying party girl. I ended up dating his best friend for years and then having a child with him. We broke up, and they had stopped being friends because of Ben's (my ex) actions (abandoning his child, being an alcoholic, etc.) Well, Jeremy reached out to me a year later asking me to "catch up" aka our first date. :) It turns out he had always had a crush on me but thought I was not interested! So we went on a few dates but I ended up moving. I didn't tell him because we were not serious and so 2 years went by and we reconnected again. We will be together a year this January. :)

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Hello everyone!

My story involves myself and a close friend of mine.

Last summer, I moved back to Maine after living in South Carolina for a year and started a new job in my hometown. One of my new co-workers happened to be one of my classmates that I graduated with. We were not friends in high school because we associated with completely different groups of people, but a few years after graduation, a lot has changed. After several months of working together, we started to see each other almost every day and we decided to meet at a local restaurant for dinner. We had a really good time and started to hang out more and more. Now, a year later she has become one of my closest friends and we spend a lot of time together.

This story describes a situation in which opposites attract because the social ties formed from our differences. (Heterophily).

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Personally, I usually stick to the birds of the same feather flock together because I find that people that are like me have similar taste in things they like to do. Me and my significant other have a lot in common with each other. Out characteristics that we share are most of our personality, but we share the same sense of humor. This is something I always look for when I try and find friends because that allows for good conversations. The ties form usually due to conversation or because I spend a lot of time with others due to education. Most of my friends were formed because we go to the same university, and have similar interest such as video games. I do think that similarity is a big role in relationships, but then again there are huge differences between me and some of my friends. There are many factors that really explain why we make friends and have people stick in our lives.

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I transferred up here to UMFK two years ago for the nursing program. I did not know anyone else up here. My example of heterophily is that I found a single room apartment which I was very excited about because I lived with three other girls in Portland. I was excited for some alone time. It happened that this apartment has a connecting door to another apartment. The girl that lived in the other apartment was very friendly and really wanted to welcome me because she knew I did not know anyone else up there. Her and I had extremely different personalities. Her cats kept clawing at the adjacent door whenever they heard me in my apartment so we ended up having to open up the door for good and let the cats wander where they wanted so they didn't ruin her door. This was a big adjustment to me because I was expecting to live alone and she was over all the time to cook supper and watch tv with me. We were very different but we did make the living situation work. I am very laid back and I believe that is why this tie worked because I would go with the flow of what she always wanted to do.

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I grew up in western Maine, where I still live and work today. When I first went away to college in 2010, I was living in New London, NH. Though New London was a bit similar to the town I was from, it was very different due to it being a college town. Most of my classmates were from the Boston area or the surrounding suburbs. Because of this, I found it difficult to connect with my classmates. They just didn't understand the slower pace and intimacy that I was used to. I can remember when introducing myself, the common questions were "what is your major" followed by "where are you from". At first, I would tell them that I was from Maine. This, of course, led them to ask "oh, where in Maine?" as if they would know the small town in Oxford County. Those tertiary questions always made me laugh. I usually would say "Rumford, near Sunday River" hoping that this geological marker would help them connect the dots. If this didn't work, I would say "Do you know where Portland is? I live about 2 hours due north of there" and they would respond "wow so you must live right on the Canadian border".
Needless to say, this made it hard to make connections with people. There were so few Maine students who understood this middle-class, small town understanding, that I felt like I didn't fit it. Don't get me wrong, I made some wonderful, fun, kind friends who I am still close with today, but this community just didn't represent who I was, and they didn't understand me. I ended up leaving that school after my sophomore year, traveled a bit, and settled back into the comfort of the Mountains.
I really do understand what it means to want to find people who are similar in some degree and understand who you are at your core. For me, I am a product of the region I grew up in. It sometimes sounds superficial, like I can't and won't be friendly to people who aren't from small towns, or from Maine. That isn't true- in fact, my boyfriend is from Vermont, and some of our close friends are from Portsmouth, NH and Portland, ME. But, because they live now in the same area that I do, they have this understanding of the culture of this region, and they understand me a little better because of that.
It makes perfect sense to me that we are drawn to the people who remind us of ourselves. I think the reason behind friendship is to connect to people who understand us, because that reduces confusion, and allows people to do activities together without miscommunication, frustration, or displeasure. People don't need to be completely the same, of course, because differences in friendships are what help us to learn and grow on an individual level.But, having equal parts of similarities and differences creates stronger friendships and allow individual growth, together (if that makes sense).

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Hello! My story is about my daughters basketball team. I am related to two of the basketball players on her team, my daughter herself and my niece, which are both homophily to me. Both my daughter and her cousin had friends on the team which made their friends homophily to them but heterophily to me. My links to the other basketball players that they are friends with are heterophily to me because I only know their friends because I am related to them (daughter/niece) and they have created the friendships on the team, which in turn makes them homophily to them!

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I am going to return to the high school days, too, for an example of heterophily.  As a freshman, I stumbled into a Creative Writing class that included students from freshmen to seniors.  This class seemed to have alternative type nerds, loners, good students, and artsy minds.  I wasn't really any of those, at the time.  Well, I wasn't seemingly those.  I played a few sports.  I didn't really have experience writing as a hobby.  I was drawn to the creativity of these people.  I took four years of Creative Writing, and I still consider myself less talented or skilled than some of the naturally creative geniuses that I sat near.  I felt special when I was able to listen to others' poems, short stories, and plays.  I watched others win awards and scholarships.  Some have since improved their English skills or went other ways.  Some are lawyers, librarians, teachers, dentists, etc. I suppose like any typical high school class.  Students go off in many directions.  I appreciate art and the beauty of it in many forms, but I am not really an artist in the typical sense.  I consider this an attraction to opposites.  Most guys were going to building trades or auto shop or skipping school. I was attracted to the "alternative" creative minds.

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Hello! My story is about my highschool class. I was not related to anyone in my class, therefore all of my classmates were heterophily to me. My best friend had two cousins in the class, which created two ties.  Her cousins were homophily to her, and even though she was my best friend, they were still heterophily to me!
I like the post Electra wrote because my boyfriend and I met at work, therefore we went from being heterophily as co-workers to homophily as significant others.

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My story about my life in which homophily or heterophily plays a role is about my job. My cousin and I had gotten a job together at a restaurant in our town. My cousin and I have one tie. After working there for a little while my cousin started dating one of our co workers which creates another tie and gives her two ties. I became friends with several of my co workers which created many new ties. All of these ties are homophily. The people I don't have anything in common with and I don't associate with are heterophily to me.
-Electra

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My story revolves around a group of friends that have dinner and board game nights. Originally, my husband and I invited my brother and a couple of co-workers. One tie was me to my brother, and then my husband had ties to the two other people. I had heard of these people, but had not met them until they came over. The homophily is the relation and the social circle of co-workers between my husband. Therefore, I was not directly tied to his co-workers. After that game night, we decided on another game/dinner night. My husband's co-workers talked to more co-workers, and a couple of my friends saw us post on Facebook about the previous game night. So we went from 5 of us to about 10 people. I had more ties this time because I was tied to my brother, and 2 friends. My husband also expanded on his ties because of the additional co-workers that came. My link to his co-workers is considered a heterophily because I know a person who knows them, and the same vice versa for my husband and my friends.

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When I think of a story of either homophily or heterophily and the joining of social ties, I think of the (very) small community I grew up in, and how my parent's threw us kids our own haunted house, that turned into a community event. First, the story is about homophily, and how the ties formed between students (myself and my classmates), how ties formed between my parent's and my friend's parents, and eventually how all of these ties created a community event. The haunted house started extremely small, in my parent's backyard and huge barn. A year later as it grew and gained attention, the haunted house shifted into the local community center with many more volunteers! I think that one of the reasons it is homophily is because it joined together a love for Halloween (and scaring the bee-jesus out of people). Funny enough, my old classmates still talk about those haunted houses from middle school. Also amusing, the fact that a small school system led our "group" of kids to grow up together, go to the same schools and somehow still meet up, even in adulthood. Anyways, one of the factors of homophily are us kids. There's myself, my brother and my sister. We were each allowed to invite 20 kids to the haunted house/Halloween party. Sometimes, a friend we invited, by word of mouth, would invite their friends. In the end, the parties would reach almost 100 people! Other times, my brother would invite less people, and I would invite his leftover 20. My parent's also invited their friend's, who usually were the parent's of our friends, AND would be considered volunteers. So, the factors of similarity are same aged kids in our grade level (let's say fifth grade), same aged kids in our community (Clifton) and same school district. Lastly, I think these factors and similarities did create the ties, due to similar interests, similar friends, similar friend groups and similar school systems. Very rarely did a kid from a different school system come to the parties at the house (this might change if we talk about the community haunted house-but it were same school-aged kids, different subgroups were invited). A factor to change this would be IF let's say one of my friend's invited someone from a different system-by word of mouth they would be associated with my network circle of friends. Overall, these parties were extremely fun, and I hope a good example of differentiating between homophily and heterophily!
-Betelgeuse