Community is something that is often spoken about, but it seems that it is rarely achieved. Communities can only get so big before they splinter into smaller communities. What makes a community worth striving for and how can we form one?

First, some background on the idea that communities tend to splinter. Nations can only become so diverse before they fracture into smaller ones (think about the former Yugoslavia; now Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and three more). On the university level, this is also a fact of life. Think of the many, many cultural clubs on campus. They form their own insular (to some degree) communities. Neighbors are just as likely to not know one another as they are to know one another. Even on the family level, time has seen the change from the extended family clan to the nuclear family.

This even extends down to the individual scale. Everyone has friends and acquaintances. There is a division between these two groups of relations, but it is not that clear-cut. As a rule of thumb, one has more friends than acquaintances.

Now, a community is the trick of making these familiar faces into acquaintances. Everyone in the community needs something in common. A simplistic case is the scenario that repeats itself on every freshman floor as the RAs make the floor into a community. You have a bunch of strangers all sharing a common dorm, and suddenly they’re a community. Sadly, it often stops there.

A community is a good thing because it is how we are supposed to live. It has been said that “no man is an island,” and this statement has proven to be true. That said, how can we establish a community?

First, we need to get to know one another. Before a community can be made out of acquaintances with something in common, people have to be acquainted. Our RAs do a good job, but it is really not something that can be forced.

One needs to get out there and get to know people. Make the effort to introduce yourself to your friend’s friend, your classmates and your neighbors. Learn people’s names! Quit making excuses about being bad with names, and just make the effort. Knowing someone’s name is the easiest way to make that person into an acquaintance (there are quite a few pages devoted to learning people’s names in the seminal “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie).

After getting to know someone, make the effort to ask, “How are you?” and to actually listen to the person’s response. People love it when someone listens to them, and they will be willing to extend the favor to you. Pretty soon, you’ll no longer be an island. You’ll find out that humankind has tended toward communities in spite of communities’ tendency to splinter, because they lead to happiness.