and partners by meeting friends of friends and other people to whom they are loosely connected.
While friends were a source of introduction for all kinds of sexual partnerships at roughly the same rate (35–40%), family members were much more likely to introduce people to their future spouses than to future one-night stands. And how people meet is also relevant to how quickly they have sex. In the Chicago study, those who met their partners through their friends were slightly more likely to have sex within a month of meeting than those who met through family members. A similar study conducted in France found that couples who met at a nightclub were much more likely to have sex within a month (45 percent) than those who met at, say, a family gathering (24 percent), which is not surprising since one typically does not have sex in mind at family events.3
These data suggest that people might use different strategies to find partners for different kinds of relationships. Maybe people ask family members for introductions to possible marriage partners and rely on their own resources to meet short-term partners. This makes intuitive sense: most drunken college students are not texting their mothers to see if they should invite that cute stranger at the bar home for the night. So, what you get when searching your network depends in part on where you are looking and what you are looking for.
However, it is clear that people rely heavily on friends and family for all kinds of relationships. When you meet a new person on your own, you only have information about yourself. In contrast, when others introduce you to someone new, they have information about both you and your potential partner, and sometimes they play the role of matchmaker (consciously or not) by encouraging meetings between people they think will get along. Friends and family are likely to know your personalities, social backgrounds, and job histories, and they also know important details such as your tendency to leave underwear on the floor or to send roses. The socially brokered introduction is less risky and more informative than going it alone, which is one reason people have relied on introductions for thousands of years.
Yet in most modern societies, we generally have a negative view of arranged marriages, and we cannot possibly imagine what it would be like to marry a stranger. Well-meaning friends and relatives who nosily interfere in our lives to help us find partners are seen as comic figures, like Yente in Fiddler on the Roof. But, in fact, our friends, relatives, and coworkers typically take on a matchmaking role only when they think we are having trouble finding a partner on our own. And as it turns out, our social network functions quite efficiently as matchmaker, even when we insist we are acting out our own private destiny.
The structure of naturally occurring social networks is perfectly suited to generate lots of leads. In networks such as bucket brigades and phone trees, there are only a limited number of people within a few degrees of separation from any one person. But in most natural social networks, there are thousands. As we discussed in chapter 1, if you know twenty people (well enough that they would invite you to a party), and each of them knows twenty other people, and so on, then you are connected to eight thousand people who are three degrees away. If you are single, one of all these people is likely to be your future spouse.
Of course, random encounters can sometimes bring strangers together, especially when incidental physical contact is involved. These happy accidents are frequently used as plot devices in romantic stories, whether it’s two people grabbing the same pair of gloves in Serendipity, an umbrella taken by mistake after a concert in Howard’s End, or dogs getting their leashes entangled in 101 Dalmatians. Incidents like these provide opportunities for further social interaction, and possibly sex or marriage, because they require what sociologist Erving Goffman called “corrective” rituals: people have to undo the “damage,” and this in turn means that they have to get to know each other. Good flirts are able to turn such happenstance into real opportunities. And the best flirts may even be able to contrive an “accident” in order to meet someone: they make their own luck. But these are the exceptions more than the rule. And it is noteworthy that even these meetings of strangers involve some degree of shared interest, whether in clothing, music, or pets, for instance.
Even when people meet on their own, without help from mutual contacts, there is a social preselection process that influences the kinds of people they are likely to run into in the first place. For example, the Chicago Sex Survey also collected data on where Americans met their partners. Sixty percent of the people in the study met their spouses at places like school, work, a private party, church, or a social club—all of which tend to involve people who share characteristics. Ten percent met their spouses at a bar, through a personal ad, or at a vacation spot, where there is more diversity but still a limited range of types of people who might be available to become future spouses.4
The locations and circumstances under which people meet partners have been changing over the past century. Our best data on this come from a study conducted in France. Looking across a broad range of venues where people meet spouses, including nightclubs, parties, schools, workplaces, holiday destinations, family gatherings, or simply “in the neighborhood,” the investigators traced the change across time. For example, from 1914 until 1960, 15 to 20 percent of people reported meeting their future spouses in the neighborhood, but by 1984 this percentage was down to 3 percent, reflecting the decline of geographically based social ties as a consequence of modernity and urbanization.5
Geography is even less important with the rise of the Internet. In 2006, one in nine American Internet-using adults—all told, about sixteen million people—reported using an online dating website or other site (such as Match.com, eHarmony.com, or the wonderfully named PlentyofFish.com, as well as countless others) to meet people.6 Of these “online daters,” 43 percent—or nearly seven million adults—have gone on actual, real-life dates with people they met online, and 17 percent of them—nearly three million adults—have entered long-term relationships or married their online dating partners, according to a systematic national survey.7 Conversely, 3 percent of Internet users who are married or in long-term committed relationships reported meeting their partners online, a number that will likely rise in the coming years.8 Gone are the days of the girl next door. People increasingly meet their partners through (offline and online) social networks that are much less constrained by geography than they used to be.
My Partner Is Just Like Me
With the decline in importance of meeting people in the neighborhood in recent years, people no longer search geographic space for partners. Nevertheless, they still search social space. Rather than going from house to house or town to town, we jump from person to person in search of the perfect mate. We see if anyone near us in our network (e.g., our friends, coworkers) would be a suitable partner, and if not, we look farther away (e.g., our friends’ friends, our coworkers’ siblings). And we often seek out circumstances, such as parties, that are likely to result in meeting friends of friends and people still farther away in our network.
We have “weak ties” to friends of friends and other sorts of people we do not know very well. But, as we will discuss in chapter 5, these kinds of ties can be incredibly valuable for connecting us to people we do not know at all, thereby giving us a much greater pool of people to choose from. So the best way to search your network is to look beyond your direct connections but not so far away that you no longer have anything in common with your contacts. A friend’s friend or a friend’s friend’s friend may be just the person to introduce you to your future spouse.
Some societies have richly prescriptive procedures for partner search,
