Facebook data is a goldmine of revelations into the structure and functioning of our social lives. The latest Facebook-related discovery offers potential answers to two great relationship questions: Should you date within your friend group? And can you tell if your relationship is destined to fail?

A study published recently has introduced an algorithm that can predict an individual’s significant other based on the mutual friends they share on Facebook. The algorithm measures “dispersion,” the extent to which two people’s mutual friends are connected to one another.

In a study of 1.3 million people, using dispersion to predict an individual’s partner performed best on the networks of married U.S. males, accurately predicting their spouse 76.9% of the time.

Interestingly, the study, a collaborative effort between Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University, and Lars Backstrom, a senior engineer at Facebook, came to the conclusion that couples with mutual friends who were widely dispersed over an array of social settings were more likely to stay together than those with mutual friends in just one social setting. The study refers to the former structure of mutual friends as “dispersed” and the latter as “embedded.”

Here is an example of dispersion: Let’s say you're a lawyer who plays softball and is involved in theatre. Your partner may know a colleague from your work, a player from your softball team, and one of the actors from your theatre company, but your friends likely do not know each other. Those shared friends would be an example of highly dispersed mutual friends. Whereas, if you and your partner happen to be co-workers and share friends within the office who all know one another, those friends would be embedded mutual friends. The second type of scenario is the type of relationship the study found tends to fail more often.

The research found that, over a 60-day period, couples who had declared that they were “in a relationship” on Facebook were more likely to break up if the structure of their mutual friends exhibited “embeddedness” rather than “dispersion.”

At first glance, this study seems to support the “don’t date within your friend group” doctrine. However, embeddedness and dispersion are not mutually exclusive. Using the example mentioned earlier, it’s possible that you and your partner are co-workers and share many “embedded” mutual friends in one network, but also share “highly dispersed” mutual friends elsewhere. The findings do not condemn dating within a friend group, but rather support maintaining a varied social background while in a relationship. It's a modern framing of the classic directive: “Keep your independence.”

Not only is maintaining a varied social background likely to make you a more independent and well-rounded person, it also enriches your partner’s social life by offering them a bridge to an assortment of diverse social networks. They, in turn, become a bridge themselves between those social worlds. The key here is to mix 'n' match.

It’s when the relationship is rooted in one indistinguishable blob of mutual friends that it is 50% more likely to fail, the study says.

So: Date your friends, date your co-workers and date your entire softball team! But make sure that if things go sour, you have plenty of other social safe havens to run to.