Spouses who live together can affect each other too, but the result is less dramatic. For every ten extra days a person is lonely, his or her spouse will be lonely for just one extra day. And siblings do not appear to affect one another at all (even the ones who live nearby); this provides additional evidence that loneliness is about our relationships to people with whom we choose to connect rather than the relationships we have inherited.
Looking beyond these direct connections, we found that loneliness spreads three degrees, just like happiness. A person’s loneliness depends not only on his friends’ loneliness, but also on his friends’ friends’ and his friends’ friends’ friends’ loneliness. The full network shows that you are about 52 percent more likely to be lonely if a person you are directly connected to (at one degree of separation) is lonely. The effect for people at two degrees of separation is 25 percent, and for people at three degrees of separation, it is about 15 percent. At four degrees of separation the effect disappears, in keeping with the Three Degrees of Influence Rule.
Finally, we observed an extraordinary pattern at the edge of the social network. At the periphery, people have fewer friends; this makes them lonely, but this also tends to drive them to cut the few ties that they have left. But before they do, they may infect their friends with the same feeling of loneliness, starting the cycle anew. These reinforcing effects mean that our social fabric can fray at the edges, like a strand of yarn that comes loose from the sleeve of a sweater. If we are concerned about combating the feeling of loneliness in our society, we should aggressively target the people at the periphery with interventions to repair their social networks. By helping them, we can create a protective barrier against loneliness that will keep the whole network from unraveling.
Feeling in Love
The psychology of emotions such as happiness and loneliness sheds light on the formation and dissolution of ties in social networks. In fact, human sensibilities such as anger, sadness, grief, and love all operate in the service of social ties. One can be angry at nature or saddened by a forest fire or love a pet, but these emotions have their origin and find their fullest expression in the anger, sadness, or love one feels in the setting of interpersonal relationships.
People the world over have different ideas, beliefs, and opinions—different thoughts—but they have very similar, if not identical, feelings. And they have similar responses to feelings in others, preferring happy friends to depressed ones, kind friends to mean ones, and loving friends to violent ones. A whole range of emotions can spread, from anger and hatred to anxiety and fear to happiness and loneliness. But there is one emotion central to human experience that we have not yet considered and that is key to understanding social connection: love.
The psychology of love and affection is obviously crucial to an understanding of the formation of social ties between people. As anthropologist Helen Fisher has argued, the sensibility of being in love may be broken down into lust, love, and attachment, all of which likely served evolutionary purposes.34 The feeling of lust has the obvious goal of driving reproduction—with almost any partner. The feeling of romantic love is something different, of course, and tends to be focused on a particular partner, or at least one partner at a time. From an evolutionary perspective, this allows the individual to conserve precious resources and not waste them in the pursuit of several objects of affection. The feeling of attachment, and the secure tie to another person that it represents, may have evolved to allow parents to jointly care for their young, which also has evolutionary advantages.
In chapter 7, we will discuss the role of natural selection in human social networks in more detail, but before we get there it is important to think about the implications of our deepest connections. Aside from the evolutionary advantages and disadvantages, feelings of lust, love, and attachment carry enormous implications for the way we connect to others. The object of one’s affection becomes the “center of one’s universe,” around which all else revolves. People experience intrusive thoughts about their beloved, aggrandize their beloved, are energized by their beloved, and are obviously deeply connected to their beloved. We usually experience such romantic love with just one person at a time. So romantic love does not determine the general organization of social networks. After all, we do not love everyone we know. And the love we have for our parents, children, siblings, and other relations is a different kind of feeling. Yet, as we will see in the next chapter, being in love is a key mechanism by which certain important social ties are formed, and it is therefore highly relevant to the origin—and function—of social networks.
CHAPTER 3 Love the One You’re With
Nicholas and his wife, Erika, like to joke that they had an arranged marriage, South Asia style. Though they lived within four blocks of each other for two years and were both students at Harvard, their paths never crossed. Erika had to go all the way to Bangladesh so that Nicholas could find her. In the summer of 1987, he went to Washington, DC, where he had grown up and gone to high school, to care for his ailing mother. He was a medical student, single, and, he foolishly thought, not ready for a serious relationship. His old high-school friend, Nasi, was also home for the summer. Nasi’s girlfriend, Bemy, who had come to know Nicholas well enough that her gentle teasing was a source of amusement for all of them, was also there. She had, as it turned out, just returned from a year in rural Bangladesh, doing community development work.
In the waterlogged village where Bemy had spent her year abroad was a beautiful young American woman with whom she shared a burning desire to end poverty and a metal bucket to wash her hair. You probably know where this story is going. One afternoon, in the middle of the monsoon, while writing a postcard to Nasi, Bemy suddenly turned to her friend Erika and blurted out: “I just thought of the man you’re going to marry.” That man was Nicholas. Erika was incredulous. But months later, she agreed to meet him in DC, when the four of them had dinner at Nasi’s house. Nicholas was of course immediately smitten. Erika was “not unimpressed,” as she later put it. That night, after getting home, Erika woke up her sister to announce that she had, indeed, met the man she was going to marry. Three dates later, Nicholas told Erika he was in love. And that is how he came to marry a woman who was three degrees removed from him all along, who had practically lived next door, who had never known him before but who was just perfect for him.
Such stories—with varying degrees of complexity and romance—occur all the time in our society. In fact, a simple Google search for “how I met my wife” and “how I met my husband” turns up thousands of narratives, lovingly preserved on the Internet. They can be short, such as this one: “How did I meet my husband? At a bar. He was a friend of the scummy boyfriend, soon-to-be-husband of my best friend (yes, they’re divorced). I was introduced to him in a bar…hooked up…and we’re still together, and married…while my best friend isn’t!”
Or the stories can be more involved: “I drove into the valley of Yosemite National Park sometime after the sun went down with my two girlfriends and a pitbull. I had worked there the two summers before and was preparing for another season. When we stepped out of the car, it was freezing, and we had to trudge through a foot of snow up to our friend’s cabin. He wasn’t home but had left a note directing us to another cabin. We were wet up to our calves by the time we reached it, and I felt uncomfortable knocking on a stranger’s door. Luckily, our friend opened up and invited us in to his friend’s cabin. He made introductions, and I must’ve seemed rude because I ran to the heater and turned my back to the room. Somehow, the occupancy level diminished without me realizing it, and I ended up sitting on a bed opposite my future husband. He reminded me of a young Dave Matthews. His southern accent was charming, and those eyes…God, those eyes. We talked well into the night until my friend, who had settled into a bed near me, sighed and begged for us to leave. I thanked him for having us, and he said, ‘Well, now you know where I live so drop in anytime.’ Back in the cold Sierra night, we giggled all the way down to the parking lot where