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, and although they severely limit personal choice for the betrothed, they still exploit network connections. Such marriages are often arranged for legal or economic reasons rather than from a desire to find a suitable partner (in the Western sense), and they are common in the Middle East and Asia. In some cultural settings, customs prescribe that the prospective partners be introduced to each other, and the parents take an active role in vetting the family and the potential spouse. In other settings, however, the marriage is a settled matter from the first meeting, and no courtship is allowed. Across cultures, there is considerable variation in who the matchmakers are (parents, professionals, elders, clergy), what pressures the matchmakers can exert, what qualifications the spouses must have (reputation, wealth, caste, religion), and what sanctions can be imposed if the couple refuses (disinheritance, death).
These practices are not immutable, however, even in societies where arranged marriage was formerly the norm. For example, the percentage of women living in Chengdu in Sichuan, China, who had arranged marriages shrank from 68 percent of those married between 1933 and 1948 to 2 percent of those wed between 1977 and 1987.9 Nevertheless, social-network ties still remain crucial; 74 percent of respondents in Chengdu report that the primary network that connects young people to potential mates is friends and relatives in the same age group.
Regardless of what kind of network people use, whether real or virtual, the process of searching for a mate is usually driven by homogamy, or the tendency of like to marry like (just as homophily is the tendency of like to befriend like). People search for—or, in any case, find—partners they resemble (in terms of their attributes) and partners who are of comparable “quality.” The Chicago Sex Survey, for example, shows that the great majority of marriages exhibit homogamy on virtually all measured traits, ranging from age to education to ethnicity. Other studies show that spouses usually have the same health behaviors (like eating and smoking), the same level of attractiveness, and the same basic political ideology and partisan affiliation (with rare, notable exceptions like Clinton adviser James Carville and Republican strategist Mary Matalin). We would expect more homophily in long-term relationships and less in short-term relationships (one is less finicky when it comes to sexual partners than potential spouses), and to some extent this is indeed the case: 72 percent of marriages exhibit homophily (based on a summary measure involving several traits), compared to 53 to 60 percent for other types of sexual relationships.10 In addition, as we shall see, spouses also become more similar over time because they influence each other (for example, in political affiliation, smoking behavior, or happiness).
On the one hand, homogamy makes intuitive sense. People like being around others who are similar to them. Most people find it comforting to imagine that partners resemble each other because it gives them hope that they, too, will someday be happy in a warm and loving relationship with a kindred spirit. On the other hand, think about the odds of finding someone just like you. Personal ads are full of complex laundry lists that must be very difficult, if not impossible, to satisfy: Wanted: frisky, down-to-earth, nonsmoking, leftist Democrat salsa dancer who likes guns, Bollywood films, NASCAR races, Ouija boards, beach sunsets, Cosmopolitans, country drives, and triathlons.
Indeed, the uniqueness of each human being has implications for how many people out there are a perfect fit in this sense. The age-old debate about whether you have one soul mate or a million rests in part on how picky you are. But even if there are a million compatible people for you, that is just one of every six thousand people in the whole world. If you are choosing at random, you had better go on a lot of dates. The dispiritingly unromantic conclusion is that you will never, ever find Mr. or Ms. Right. Not without some help.
But the surprising power of social networks is that they bring likes together and serve up soul mates in the same room. Bigger and broader social networks yield more options for partners, facilitate the flow of information about suitable partners via friends and friends of friends, and provide for easier (more efficient, more accurate) searching. Hence, they yield “better” partners or spouses in the end. The odds of finding that soul mate just improved substantially.
Given the structure of social networks, our tendency to be introduced to our partners, and our innate comfort with people we resemble, it is not surprising that we generally wind up meeting, having sex with, and marrying people like ourselves. The choice of a partner is constrained by the same social forces that create network ties in the first place. Who we befriend, where we go to school, where we work—all these choices largely depend on our position in a given social network. No matter where people search, their network generally acts to bring similar people together. The fact that spouses are so often similar manifestly disproves the idea that people meet and choose their partners by chance.
Big Fish, Little Pond
American satirist H. L. Mencken famously observed that wealth is “any income that is at least one hundred dollars