“CONNECTED” by Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

I was surprised and upset at the same time when I found out from the book “Connected” that what I considered a miraculous chance meeting with my future husband, was a matter of social connection:

“The romantic essence of these stories is that they seem to involve both luck and destiny.
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.
So while chance encounters between strangers do happen, and while people sometimes do find their partners without assistance, the majority of people find spouses and partners by meeting friends of friends and other people to whom they are loosely connected.”

This is the opinion of the authors Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler based on countless researches done by them or other psychologists on social networks:

„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.”

For me, it was overwhelming that:
“When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.”

Despite the scientific research, I am a hopeless romantic at heart, therefore I still believe what my husband said about our first meeting. That he came to our university with the sole purpose of finding me. 🙂 

Kindle, 2023