When friends stopped making introductions

Ask a couple in their sixties how they met and you will usually hear about a third person. A sister, a colleague, a friend who had been saying for months that you two would get on. The introduction was the event. Somebody who knew both of you made a judgement, and that judgement carried weight.

Michael Rosenfeld and colleagues at Stanford have tracked how American couples meet across several decades. Their finding, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that meeting online overtook meeting through friends as the most common route for heterosexual couples around 2013, and has kept climbing since.

The more striking number is what happened to the intermediary. In their 2009 data, 11.2 percent of couples who met online had some person involved in the connection. By 2017 that had fallen to 3.7 percent. Eighty-nine percent of couples who met online were complete strangers to one another beforehand, with no shared connection of any kind.

Rosenfeld's word for this is disintermediation. It is a term borrowed from economics, where it describes what happens when a platform removes the middleman. Applied to romance it means something specific: the person who used to vouch for you is gone.

There were real costs to the old system. It was small, it was slow, and it reproduced whoever your family and colleagues already were. Plenty of people were never introduced to anyone because the people around them did not think to. The move online opened the field, particularly for anyone whose community was not going to supply a partner.

But something was lost that is worth naming. An introduction from someone who knows you both carries information that a profile cannot. They know how you actually are at dinner, not how you describe yourself. They know which of your previous relationships went wrong and why. They are staking a small amount of their own credibility on the guess. That is why a friend's introduction always felt different from a stranger's message, and why it still does.

Matchmaking is not a return to the old arrangement. It is an attempt to rebuild the part of it that worked, and to do it deliberately rather than by accident of who you happen to know. The judgement is the product. Everything else is logistics.