Memorial Day kicks off the summer social, dating, and party season — and just in case you’re still on the fence about hitting that Memorial Day BBQ, I’d like to offer up a little incentive for my single friends out there.
Six Degrees of BBQ is one of my absolute favorite ways to meet someone great. You know how you always invite the same seventeen people to all of your parties? Next time, add some new blood to the old gang. With Six Degrees of BBQ, everybody you invite brings someone that nobody else in the group knows. Think of it as six degrees of separation, only backwards. Voila! You’ll have a party full of brand-new people who already get along great with your closest friends. Kind of a “people potluck.”
Here’s why it works: Research shows that we tend to have lots of things in common (level of education, happiness, intelligence, career standing, values about issues like money and politics, as well as similar levels of mental health, etc) with people who are already tight with our closest friends. But there’s even more — those similarities extend to things like what neighborhoods we live in, the dry cleaner or peanut butter we prefer, and whether we get our pasta sauce at Trader Joe’s or the Piggly Wiggly.
We attract and seek out friendships and relationships with other people who are a lot like us. Everybody does, which is why it’s way easier to meet someone you’re compatible with if they’ve already been “pre-screened” by your friends, or your friends’ friends than say, via an online dating site or Tinder.
So for your next party, ask all your friends to bring a friend nobody else knows. You never know who you might meet.
XO,
Need more advice for dating? Check out my best-selling dating book Stop Getting Dumped! 
