Marriage: the choice of who you will wake up to, scream at, share life’s big and small moments with, is a big decision. How do we search for such a person, and what do we value? In my research I explore these questions using a unique method of finding marriage partners: through marriage advertisements.
Growing up in urban Pakistan, my own fascination with marriage ads began with a curiosity about culture. The ads provide a unique insight into what kinds of partner traits are valued, and by omission not valued, in the current social milieu. This is what initially led me to collect marriage ads from the year 1980 to 2000 (at 5-year intervals) from a newspaper in Pakistan. The newspaper I chose was the English language newspaper with the largest readership for that timeframe, Dawn. While its readers are not representative of the average Pakistani reader, they provide an interesting case study. My findings point to constraints women face in marriage search, and I would expect these to be even greater for the general population.
In developing countries, especially in South Asia, advertisements play a serious role in searching for partners: they are used by parents to search for spouses for their children. A typical marriage ad consists of information on who the match is being sought, son or daughter for, age, possibly education, occupation, physical appearance, religion, and ethnicity. The second part of the ad describes the qualities of the ideal match along the same characteristics.
After collecting the ads and organizing them into a way economists and other analysts could use, I dove into understanding what traits are valued by men and women (or, at least by their parents), how this changed over time, and how men and women search for partners.
What I found immediately was that men and women have very distinct ways of searching for partners. Women systematically ask for fewer characteristics in their desired partners than men do. Instead, most of their ad is spent describing their own traits and merits. The ads cost a standard rate for a minimum number of words, beyond which there is an extra cost per word. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to spend this cost on describing what they want in a partner.
Why might this be the case? Looking at how ads change depending on the age of the ad-poster sheds some light on this question. The number of distinct traits desired by women in their potential partners peaks at about age 24, and then declines steadily. For men, the peak is a decade later, around 34. To put this in context, the average age of marriage for women in Pakistan was between 18-23 in 1991 . The ads suggest that as women approach the end of this range, they make fewer demands in potential spouses. This strategy seemingly corresponds to one of casting as wide a net as possible. Meanwhile, for men, the strategy is to elicit people who match their desired qualities.
Why would age be such an important feature of marriage search for women? It turns out that both the demands made in marriage ads, and the own characteristics mentioned, are strongly consistent with traditional gender norms. Men are twice as likely as women to ask for physical traits in partners, such as beauty, height, complexion, and weight. Physical traits have traditionally been linked to health and the ability to bear children . This might be why women are more likely to emphasize their own physical features when placing ads too. Meanwhile, in their own marriage partners women seek men in stable, high paying occupations, and mirroring this, male ad-posters emphasize their occupation and education.
Together the ads data paint an interesting picture. Against the backdrop of strong gender norms (which are prevalent in many societies today, as seen in the pandemic), women are valued for traits related to childbearing, and men to traits related to the ability to provide. Since women’s fecundity is bound by time, there is pressure to be married by a certain age. Perhaps for this reason in the marriage ads they are far less picky in their search for partners relative to men, and their demands decline with age. Interestingly, I also find this to be true of women who mention their education in the ads and are more educated.
The downside of a strategy of being less selective is having to decide among suitors who may not be personally desirable. This is especially true given that partner search is costly in time and effort, and that individuals can only go through a certain number of proposals before deciding. Being more specific about traits narrows the market, signals what is important, and may lead to higher quality matches because the starting pool was more tailored to what someone wants. In fact, using Labor Force Survey data for the same time and geographic locations as the ads, I find that the actual characteristics of spouses (in terms of spousal age gaps and educational gaps) are closer to those desired by men in the ads than those desired by women. All in all, for such a substantial decision in one’s life, it may be worth it to be more specific!
Bio: Fatima Aqeel is an Assistant Professor at the Colgate University Department of Economics, with research interests at the intersection of labor, gender, and development Economics.