It's called validation. We seek friendships with people that validate our senses of self, however fractured or healthy they may be. I've always said that common interests don't make a lasting relationship, but rather whether or not that relationship validates what you believe about yourself on a fundamental level at that time.

For instance, some people wonder why some choose to abandon loving partners and instead embrace and marry abusive ones. On some level, a partner that treats this person like crap validates what they unconsciously believe about themselves at the time, that they are crap. Human beings being resistant to evolution and change because it exposes them to existential anxiety and really uncomfortable dissonance, will resist to the very end and remain with what they are comfortable with because validation of their existence is so damn important. Without that validation they cannot separate their experience from that of the world and they feel an engulfment or loss of their identity.

Core beliefs are created as a flux of childhood experiences, parental responses to temperament, environment, and progressing life experiences. The more we seek out environments and relationships which validate our childhood experiences, the more calcified these core beliefs become. This is why therapeutic intervention is so important and a constant challenging of ourselves is so important. Its important to embrace discomfort and the unnatural because that is what will help us grow and develop as people.