Friendly Introductions

A common way of meeting potential future partners is via friends; more specifically, those that claim to know you well enough to be able to introduce you (or not, as the case may be) to further mates of theirs. Now, generally, I agree with this concept: it's called networking and is perfectly fine and sound in both theory and practice.

However that bit above in brackets does tend to get me all worked up whenever this topic arises. For instance, someone I was once discussing this with declared: "I know xxx (points to someone in the group) and yyy (points to another) would never work out, so I wouldn't bother making the introduction between them". It's this inaction which totally baffles me. What makes them so sure that this particular relationship wouldn't work out?

As an extreme example of why I'm bothered let's take a guy or girl who has never been in a relationship before. No matter how close you are with this person, there's no absolute way of knowing how they'd behave in that kind of situation. Heck, they probably wouldn't know themselves. How can anyone else say how well or not they'd get on with someone else on a romantic level?

And it's not just those that have never dated whom you don't know about. In my opinion there's no real way of telling exactly how any two random people will act together under an equally random circumstance let alone a romantic one, even if you've known them for ever and have seen them in a variety of different situations.

Sure, you can make calculated guesses (and even that becomes difficult to do when friends request abstract things like "someone who will make me feel special"), but even if you did that, by definition there's a chance that you could be utterly wrong. The fact that we see so many people in successful relationships, who, on paper, are totally incompatible with each other proves this much - I mean, hello? Have you not seen Dharma and Greg?

Finding the right person is, ultimately, just a numbers game. And yes, if there are strict objective criteria missing in a candidate (and there is nothing wrong with that being the case) then there's no point in wasting any time. But that's not really the situation for many of us, is it?

Despite being a relatively friendly chap (mohoho) I know I won't get along with everyone. In fact I'm sure my friends are a good judge of what would work and what wouldn't for me. However, as much as I trust them, I do think that there's a minute chance that they could get it wrong. I prefer to let the people in question themselves decide whether things will work out between them or not.