You don’t need to be the most beautiful or most wealthy person to get the most desirable partner; you just need to be more attractive than all the other women or men in your network. In short, the networks in which we are embedded function as reference groups[.]

Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, Connected: How your friends' friends' friends affect everything you feel, think, and do, New York, 2011, p. 74