And here Arditi offers a very interesting idea, namely that social distance derives not from the absence of common traits, but from the abstract nature of these traits. Remoteness, that is, does not set in because people have nothing in common, but because the things they have in common are, or have become, too common. To put this slightly differently, I would suggest that remoteness derives from the fact that people now share a common and highly standardized language.

[...]

Conversely, closeness results from the specificity and exclusivity of similarities shared between two entities. In this sense, nearness implies the sharing of “existentially generated meanings.” It is, in other words, the fact that, to an increasing degree, we have cultural techniques to standardize intimate relationships, to talk about them and manage them in a generalized way, which weakens our capacity for nearness, the congruence between subject and object.

— Cold Intimacies by Eva Illouz