Early on, the best predictor of a relationship doesn’t depend on the couple’s social graph at all; for the first year or so of dating, the optimal method is how often they view each other’s profile. Only over time, as the page views go down and their mutual network fills out, does assimilation come to dominate the calculus. In other words, the curiosity, discovery, and (visual) stimulation of falling for someone is eventually replaced by the graph-theory equivalent of nesting.
