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       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 I turned to my girlfriends and said those fateful words, ‘I’m going to marry that man!’ Two years and five months later, I did.”¹

      How I Met My Partner

      The romantic essence of these stories is that they seem to involve both luck and destiny. But, if you think about it, these meetings aren’t so chancy. What these stories really have in common is that the future partners started out with two or three degrees of separation between them before the gap was inexorably closed.

      The romantic ideal of finding a partner often also involves the sense that you have the right “chemistry” with your intended or that the two of you fall in love for mysterious, inexplicable reasons. We think of falling in love as something deeply personal and hard to explain. Indeed, most Americans believe that their choice of a partner is really no one else’s business. Some people select their partners impulsively and spontaneously; others quite deliberately. Either way, partner choice is typically seen as a personal decision. This view of relationships is consistent with our general tendency to see major life decisions as individual choices. We like to believe that we are at the helm of our ship, charting an entirely new course, no matter how choppy the seas. It’s surprising and maybe even disappointing to discover that we are in fact sailing through well-traveled shipping lanes using universal navigational tools.

      Because we are so sure of our individual power to make decisions, we lose sight of the extraordinary degree to which our choice of a partner is determined by our surroundings and, in particular, by our social network. This also helps to explain the romantic appeal of stories involving putatively chance encounters, for they seem to suggest that forces larger than ourselves are at work, and that romance with a particular, unknown person is predestined and magical. Now, we are not suggesting there isn’t something amazing about meeting the love of your life after trudging through the snow at Yosemite or washing your hair in a bucket in Bangladesh. It’s just that those magical moments are not as random as we might think.

      Consider some systematic data about how people meet their partners. The National Survey of Health and Social Life, also quaintly known as the Chicago Sex Survey, studied a national sample of 3,432 people aged eighteen to fifty-nine in 1992 and provides one of the most complete and accurate descriptions of romantic and sexual behavior in the United States.² It contains detailed information about partner choice, sexual practices, psychological traits, health measures, and so on. It also includes a type of data that is surprisingly very rare, namely, how and where people actually met their current sexual partners. The table shows who introduced couples in different kinds of relationships.

       Who introduced the couple?