Yes, I believe you do need a common interest to meet people. You're not going to meet people just randomly walking down the street, and if I don't like sports, I won't have much to talk about with someone at a sports bar. But a common interest can be liking the same movies or going on walks, which he and I did do together. A common interest doesn't have to be a hobby necessarily. Most of the people that I know now, including this guy, were all met thru belonging to a volunteer charity organization. That was the common interest at the time. It wasn't a particular hobby, it was a shared interest to help others and meet new people.

But while I agree that a common interest is needed to initially meet people, I don't believe it can sustain a friendship or any relationship if you don't also share common values and beliefs and have trust. I'm creative. I can go to at art class and meet many people who share my love for art, but if they don't share my same values on how to treat people, if they don't believe in G-d or if they end up being judgmental bigots, then having art in common doesn't matter because I won't want to be around that kind of person.

I have several tried and true friends I have known for 20 plus years who I have don't have any activities in common with at all, but we can hang out for hours and never run out of things to talk about. They support me and will never judge or lie to me. They treat me with respect and treat others with respect.

I guess I've had so many types of people come in and out of my life, that I'm at the point where having activities in common doesn't matter to me anymore. What matters to me the most is how someone is treating me and how they treat others. How they see the world.

I believe this guy is trying to find someone who is the total opposite of his ex wife. I know who she is thru mutual friends, so I'm going to just assume she didn't share his interests. So what I really think is going on with him is he's just not wasting any time on anyone who may remind him of his ex. I think between not having his same athletic and sports interests in common and also being insecure, that was enough reason for him to not pursue the friendship. I know many of his friends he's known for years and I know for a fact the only thing some of them do together is go to the movies. If that's all he has in common with them, then he could have gone to movies with me too, but he's not looking for friends, at least not more female ones. He and I DID have some things in common, they just weren't the specific sports related interests he was looking for. For some reason he doesn't seem to think other interests count if they're not HIS. He told me he didn't see that I had any outside interests other than job hunting. That's not true. I told him several times about my photography, that I joined a photography Meetup group, that I was working on crafts for my Etsy page. He never acknowledged these because they weren't sports related.

So, no, I'm not going to meet new people unless I join a group, go to an event or take a class for something I have an interest in. But whether or not I decide to remain friends with the people I meet is going to have nothing to do with the fact that we like to go hiking together. Anyone can go hiking. Not everyone is going to share my same values, beliefs and know how to treat me with the respect and decency that I deserve.

I also know that this wasn't the ONLY reason he decided to not be friends anymore. We had enough in common to remain friends. We liked the same movies, we went on walks, we had the same political views. We've talked for hours and didn't run out of things to say. Whatever the other reason(s) are/were, he used this one because it was the easier excuse to give me.