You can't choose your family.

You might get to choose your friends, and align with those who make you laugh and give you support when you need it, but with your family, you are stuck with what you are given.

We have grown up with this, but it's not really true in our modern world.

When a family is supportive we increase their "face time" and seek them out.

If that family is caustic, toxic or constantly critical of your lifestyle choices they get tuned out. In time they will see less and less of you and they will lose the influence that being family commanded.
So the rule, given enough time, applies to family as well as friends alike.

With friends, one assumes that one is able to choose just the good ones and push away the rest, but in reality, one makes friends based on circumstance more than on the aligning of spirits as they would have us believe.

Our oldest friends were those we played with as kids, rode with on that bus met in school. These were all opportunistic friendships. It's true that we gravitated to some and rejected others, but all of us have many friends who don't share our views. If we had to go out and make friends we would certainly not choose them.

With a high school reunion, this becomes so clear.
People you considered your life long buddies aside, one was expected to be friends with all the kids in your year.

Those you gravitated towards, and those who's sphere didn't intersect with yours.

The results are interesting.
Some guys who were real Dicks when they were young, have grown up to be adult versions.

Others who you might not have noticed, or only interacted with superficially, have grown into really cool, thinking, funny and interesting people.

People you would and should seek out and make friends with today.

So while the reunion puts one back in the mix with all the bullies and arses who tormented you as a teenager, it also exposes you to really cool people who have blossomed out of the quiet shy kids you didn't notice.

These new friends make the exercise worthwhile.

Then there is Propinquity.

This is defined as the attraction one might feel for a person, that develops from extended exposure.

A person who you didn't quite take to, that becomes attractive in your eyes after lots of close exposure.

They grow on you.  (not like a fungus)

In a famous Western the Sherif was tracking this beautiful outlaw through the Badlands. He comes across this old guy on a donkey cart.
When asked if he had seen beautiful women pass through the desert, the old guy  answered,  " No I haven't, but  I have spent so long on this cart that even my donkey is looking, mighty fine!"

M Parak 2017