# Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.6753 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.6753/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2013.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Exact Learning of Weighted Graphs Using Composite Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14882/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A crucial task in the analysis of on-line social-networking systems is to identify important people --- those linked by strong social ties --- within an individual's network neighborhood. Here we investigate this question for a particular category of strong ties, those involving spouses or romantic partners. We organize our analysis around a basic question: given all the connections among a person's friends, can you recognize his or her romantic partner from the network structure alone? Using data from a large sample of Facebook users, we find that this task can be accomplished with high accuracy, but doing so requires the development of a new measure of tie strength that we term `dispersion' --- the extent to which two people's mutual friends are not themselves well-connected. The results offer methods for identifying types of structurally significant people in on-line applications, and suggest a potential expansion of existing theories of tie strength.