We propose a new measure that quantifies the "closeness" between two nodes in a given graph. The calculation of the measure is linear in the number of edges in the graph and involves just a small number of relaxation sweeps. The calculated measure is actually all that is required for the coarsening purposes. A similar notion of distance is then calculated and used at each coarser level. We demonstrate the use of this new measure for the minimum (1,2)-sum linear ordering problem and for the minimum 2-partitioning problem.