Abstract
Online dating has modernized traditional partner search methods, allowing individuals to seek a partner that aligns with their preferences for attributes such as age, height, location, or education. Yet traditional forms of partner selection still exist, with continued parental involvement in the matching process. In this paper, we exploit different matchmaking methods with varying degrees of youth autonomy versus parental involvement. We use a unique dataset collected in Chengdu, China, where profiles from the blind date market (n = 158) capture parental preferences and profiles from an online dating website (n = 500) capture individual preferences. Regarding gender, we find that men generally display a desire for women younger, shorter, and less educated than themselves, while women desire older and taller men of the same education as themselves. With regards to parental influences, we find parents specify a narrower range of accepted partner attributes. Further, we find an interaction effect between gender and generational influences: the preferences of parents advertising their daughters on the blind date market show a greater discrepancy in attribute preferences to the online daters than parents advertising their sons.
Highlights
Since the advent of the reform and opening-up, Chinese society has undergone a considerable structural change (Guan et al 2018; Gao and Wang 2020)
Online female daters are more educated, with a higher proportion of Bachelor’s degrees (66.4% vs. 60%) and Master’s degrees (10.8% vs. 7.6%)
The gender age pattern observed in the online sample is reversed in the offline sample; that is, men are significantly older than women (35.9 years vs. 31.8 years, p = 0.004), and the differences in relationship status composition are insignificant
Summary
Since the advent of the reform and opening-up, Chinese society has undergone a considerable structural change (Guan et al 2018; Gao and Wang 2020). These modernizing influences on Chinese society and economy have simultaneously recast mate selection and matchmaking approaches (Chang et al 2011; Blair and Madigan 2016, 2018). Under traditional approaches to matchmaking in China, third parties such as parents and other connections within a closed-form social network recommend partners from a known pool of individuals with strategic benefits for the family in mind (Riley 1994). One of China’s most popular dating websites claims to host up to 60 million daters, with the largest fraction of users being between 20 and 30 years old and mostly single (Xia et al 2014)
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