There's a man at my Thursday walking group. Early sixties, retired electrician, walks at the back with whoever's slowest that day. He's been coming for eleven years. Ask him anything about anyone — who moved house, whose daughter got married, who's recovering from what — and he knows, because he was there when it started being news.
He is, by a distance, the most socially wealthy man I know. And he's never once, in eleven years, done anything that could be called networking.
He's a regular. I was, until a couple of years ago, a tourist.
The distinction. A tourist attends events. A regular belongs to contexts. The tourist goes to the networking thing, the gala, the one-off hike posted in a Facebook group, the party where he knows the host. Each event is its own little expedition: arrive, be charming, collect contacts, leave. The energy cost is high, because every room is full of strangers, and the yield is low, because strangers at events are guarding their attention.
The regular goes to the same place at the same time with the same people, week after week. The energy cost is low — nobody performs for people they see every Thursday. And the yield compounds, because familiarity is doing quietly, over months, what the tourist has to do manually, in an evening, at volume.
If you're past 40 and trying to widen your life — for friendship, for community, or yes, for dating — this distinction is the whole game. And almost everyone gets it backwards, because events feel productive. You dressed up, you went out, you talked to people. Surely that counts. But nothing compounds at an event. Everything compounds in a context.
Why familiarity wins. Think about how you actually came to know your closest friends. Almost none of them came from a single meeting — they came from repetition. School, work, a sports team, the street you lived on. Proximity repeated until a stranger became a face, a face became a name, a name became a person, and a person became a friend. Not one of those steps happens faster because you forced it. They happen on schedule, and the schedule is: again.
There's a fair amount written about how many hours it takes to make a friend — the research puts a casual friend around 50 hours, a real friend past 200. You cannot get 200 hours from anyone at events. You get 200 hours by being somewhere that meets weekly. The maths is boring and it's also the answer.
For dating, the same physics apply, with one addition: in a recurring context, the introduction problem solves itself. The woman at the tennis club has spoken to you six times before either of you does anything brave. You're not a stranger; you're the guy from Thursday. Whatever happens next, it starts from warmth and accuracy — she knows how you treat people, because she's watched you do it for three months. No profile on earth can compete with three months of being decent in a shared room.
How to become a regular anywhere. It's embarrassingly simple and almost nobody does it, because the price is patience and the currency is consistency:
Pick two, not twelve. Two recurring contexts you'd attend even if you never met anyone — sport that mixes, a class, volunteering, the hall committee. The "you'd attend anyway" test is load-bearing. Regulars are people who like the thing. Tourists are people who want the people, and everyone can tell them apart from across the room.
Attend like it's a job. Same day, same time, no negotiation with yourself. The first month, you're new, and being new is mildly awkward, and the tourist instinct says "this isn't working, try a different event." Ignore it. You're not failing to connect; you're accruing hours. Around week six, something shifts: you know names, you have in-jokes, the group starts handing you things — a working bee, a coffee after, a "you should come to..."
Do the small services. The electrician at the back of the walking group carries the spare water, remembers who has a dodgy knee, organises the Christmas walk. Nothing grand. Being useful in small, consistent ways is how a context converts you from attendee to member — and members are the ones the context looks after.
Stay through the boring stretches. Every recurring context has a flat patch — the January slump, the month the walk route is dull, the interminable AGM. Tourists leave at the flat patch, which is precisely why tourists stay tourists. The flat patch is where the regulars are earned.
Apply it to more than dating. This is the quiet kicker. I came to all this through wanting a relationship after deleting the apps, and it worked — slowly, then genuinely. But the bigger change was everything else: the walking group's Tuesday coffees, the cooking class turning into a supper club, knowing my neighbourhood for the first time in a decade. The regulars have better lives than the tourists in every dimension, because their wealth is in the room, not the guest list.
The tourist asks: what's on this weekend? The regular asks: what's on Thursdays? One of those questions builds a life.