Love before Tinder

“Man, 28, from an excellent family, pleasant appearance, good prospects, wishes to marry young lady with a dowry.” Published in Le Chasseur Français¹ in 1896, this small ad will now raise a smile. Who today would openly display their desire for income on Tinder or Match? And yet, at the time, speaking about money was perfectly natural. In 1903, a “keen hunter” about to return “to Tonkin” (as it was then called) specified the amount of his assets (8,000 francs in the colonies, 2,700 in France) to attract the “well-groomed and educated” woman of his dreams. In 1904, a “young man of high society, perfect in every respect, wealthy, fortune entirely in securities” declared without embarrassment that he was seeking a young woman “with land.”²

Marriage as an economic contract

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Dialogues économiques is a digital journal published by the Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMU, CNRS, EHESS, Centrale Méditerranée). A gateway between academic research and society, Dialogues économiques provides all citizens with the keys to economic reasoning. Articles are published every two weeks.

This frankness is hardly surprising. When it comes to the question of who marries whom, the demographer and sociologist Alain Girard pointed out as early as 1964 that Cupid does not strike at random : people marry above all within their own social group³. It was not until the late 1970s that this social homogamy – the tendency to marry someone from the same background – began to decline. French society then became more open, although the tendency of graduates from elite schools to marry among themselves remained strong⁴.

What remains is to understand how this change came about. Is it because we now encounter people from different social backgrounds more frequently than in the past ? Or because we place greater value on emotional harmony than on financial security ? In other words, is the current evolution linked to a transformation of the ‘marriage market,’ or to a shift in our preferences ? It is this question that economists Quentin Lippmann and Khushboo Surana set out to answer.

One million personal ads

In order to capture people’s desires even before any actual meeting took place, the two researchers turned to matrimonial advertisements published in France, North America and India. These ads were extremely popular throughout the twentieth century, even if they seem to have led to relatively few unions (between 1 and 3 per cent in France)⁵.

The two economists collected around one million advertisements placed by those seeking a soulmate, published from 1950 up to 1995, the year Match.com – one of the first online dating sites – was created. They subsequently ‘read’ them, or rather subjected them to statistical analysis. This analysis was all the easier to automate given that the texts bear little resemblance to the complexity of medieval courtly poetry – paid for by the word, the ads are brief and efficient: “X (young man, widow, wealthy divorcee, etc.) would like to meet / would respond to / would marry Y (attractive musician, Paris-based executive, or man aged 38–45).”