They met in the Wimbledon queue. He flew from California to her wedding.

Jacqueline, a fan from Essex, fell for Wimbledon before she ever saw a court in person. As a girl in the 1970s, she listened to matches on the radio. She first went with her family in 1984 and never really left. Somewhere along the way she met Nicola Dawson, a fellow fan, in the least likely way: through a shared, slightly obsessive love of one tennis player, Boris Becker. Out of that one shared obsession grew a friendship that has now lasted forty years . Across four decades the two of them came back to Wimbledon every summer, pitched a tent, and, as Jacqueline puts it, had “great adventures.”

Ask her for the best day and she doesn't hesitate: the men's semi-finals in 2013, the same year Andy Murray finally went on to win it.

That day was pure magic. Hot, sunny, incredible matches from a prime seat on Centre Court, and the sheer joy of seeing a British man reach the final. I'll admit, I definitely shed a tear when Andy finally won it.— Jacqueline Webb-Watson, BBC News[1]

Forty Julys in a row: the same tournament, the same grass, the same tent. Those yearly returns, hour by hour, bound the two women together for life. No single dazzling evening could have.

A night in the queue

Wimbledon has something you won't find anywhere else in tennis: The Queue, with a capital Q. For decades, people have arrived the day before, pitched tents in Wimbledon Park, and slept on the grass to get a court ticket in the morning. It's a ritual with its own code, a world away from standing in line: everyone gets a dated, numbered queue card (which still doesn't guarantee entry), only two-person tents are allowed, stewards wake everyone at six to pack up, and you can't leave for more than half an hour . Each day, on the days those courts play, five hundred tickets for each of the three main courts go to the people who waited out the night.

And something happens there that online ticketing shuts out everywhere else: people actually meet. Lucy Nixon, from Norfolk, started camping in the queue in 2002. That's where she met Richard Hess, an American from California who has come to Wimbledon every year since 1978. “We just hit it off straight away,” she says. “Wimbledon is our annual get-together.” In time, Richard flew across the ocean to attend her wedding, and she went to visit him to watch the US Open together .

The friendships fans make in the 'camping community' of the queue is what makes it so special.— Lucy Nixon, BBC News[1]

Reporters describe it in a line that reads like an accidental definition: these are “the sort of friendships that only form through shared waiting.”

The science of waiting

And here begins the most interesting part, because that line turns out to be almost exactly true. For a century, psychology has been breaking down the very things the Wimbledon Queue is made of — and it keeps arriving at the same answer.

More than a hundred years ago the sociologist Émile Durkheim called it collective effervescence: when a group gathers and, for a while, feels like one body, a shared energy forms that binds people more tightly than any words . For decades it was a beautiful theory with no hard data. Then science got to work on its separate parts.

The first is synchrony: doing something together, in the same rhythm. In a field experiment reported in Scientific Reports, researchers gathered 172 strangers and tested what happened when they moved in time and shared physical arousal. The effect was measurable: people stood closer together and helped each other more, most strongly when synchrony and shared arousal came together . In a classic study in Psychological Science, it was enough for strangers to move in rhythm for a while, and afterwards they trusted and helped each other more, even at a cost to themselves, and even when they weren't in a good mood . Our bodies can fall into step quite literally: at one fire-walking ritual, the hearts of participants and the spectators close to them beat in time, while the hearts of strangers did not .

The most important finding is also the most disarming. When the researcher Jeffrey Hall counted how many hours it takes for strangers to become friends, he landed on roughly fifty hours to reach a casual friendship, about ninety to become friends, and more than two hundred before someone becomes truly close . The catch is what kind of hours they have to be. Time spent simply hanging around each other (catching up, joking, waiting) built closeness. Hours spent working together, or sitting in the same class, did not . What draws us together is the dull, repeated, unplanned time. Exactly what the Wimbledon Queue has in abundance. The impressive events matter less than we think.

To be fair: none of these researchers stood in that queue with a stopwatch. Nobody proved that the Queue itself makes friends. What was proven is different — that each ingredient the Queue is built from does it on its own. The Queue simply gathers them all in one place.

Both sides of the net

The same mechanism runs on the other side of the net too, in the champions themselves.

Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert played each other eighty times between 1973 and 1988; sixty of those matches were finals . For fifteen years they did everything they could to beat each other. And today, after fifty years of friendship and after both came through cancer, Martina bakes Chris bread.

Martina's and my relationship — because we've had one for 50 years — is not the type where we have to talk to each other every day to maintain the closeness.— Chris Evert, NPR[8]

Eighty evenings across the same net built that closeness, match after match. It went much the same for Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal — three Wimbledon finals in a row, including the 2008 one still called the greatest match in tennis history . When Federer said goodbye to the game in 2022, he played his last match paired with Nadal, and afterwards the two sat side by side and wept, holding hands. “Sharing the court with you that night, and sharing those tears, will forever be one of the most special moments of my career,” Federer later wrote . The man who beat him most turned out to be the one he wanted beside him at the very end.

What we're losing

I'm writing about this because it's precisely this bond we're losing fastest right now — and not because we've stopped caring. The research on friendship is bluntly specific here: unlike family ties, friendship fades the moment contact and shared activity drop off . You don't need a falling-out. You just need to stop seeing each other. And we're seeing each other less and less: in the US, time spent with friends fell from sixty minutes a day in 2003 to twenty by 2020 . The share of adults with no close friend at all rose from three percent in 1990 to twelve in 2021 .

And the stakes run past sadness. A much-cited meta-analysis by Holt-Lunstad found that people with stronger ties are fifty percent more likely to still be alive at follow-up than those with weaker ones, an effect on a par with quitting smoking . Loneliness alone is linked to a twenty-six percent higher risk of dying than being not lonely . These are correlations, not a verdict. But they make it fairly clear which side is worth standing on.

Your own July

And on that better side, each of us has someone specific to reclaim. You have a Jacqueline somewhere. Or a Richard from the queue. Someone you once shared a small, repeated thing with (a match, a walk, a Tuesday coffee) before life pulled you to opposite ends of the city, or opposite ends of the world. You didn't fall out. It's just that “we should meet up sometime” came back less and less, until it stopped coming back at all.

The good news is you don't need a grand gesture. You need one fixed date: your own small Wimbledon. A date that comes around on its own each year takes the hardest part off your plate: the annual negotiation over whether and when. All that's left is to show up. Jacqueline and Nicola didn't arrange it forty times over. They had one July — and it was enough for a lifetime.

So maybe don't ask anyone “so, shall we meet up sometime?” today. Pick one recurring date instead, and send it to someone who's been waiting. The rest (those fifty, ninety, two hundred hours) will add up on their own. One July after another.

See you in the queue — the Lieto team.