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College as a Marriage Market
- iambateman 6y agoBy this logic, could any social activity among 18-30 year olds be called a marriage market? Video games as a marriage market. Instagram as a marriage market. Church as a marriage market. I’ve never met someone who selected a particular college because they expected to find a better mating pool. There are lots of people who don’t go to college who have marriage markets of their own.
- purplecats 6y agoInteresting, as I've been considering going to Harvard for the purposes of finding a suitable dating partner. I can't think of a better place to find someone with the qualities that I desire, other than possibly top tier prestigious companies.
- zhdc1 6y agoI'm assuming you're being absolutely fascitious. If you're not (and you're female), Wellesley is a better choice. You have more options (Harvard, MIT, Olin, &c.), and the parties are better :').
- ddek 6y agoIf anyone’s reading from the UK, St Andrew’s University is known for the number of marriages it creates. It’s not surprising, given you’re spending 4-5 years in a tiny, predominantly student, town. Also, the university has an ‘academic family’ system which produces exactly the expected results.
- skrebbel 6y agoSmart! I recommend you also try joining a Tennis Club. There's lots of humans there of various genders and with various qualities, likely including some of those you desire. Their bodies are above-average healthy and their backgrounds are often upper class. IQ is a little all over the place but that's an easy one to filter out. Prefer a Tennis Club that publishes an annual yearbook with all members' credentials so you can better filter their qualities by merging and processing data from public sources programmatically.
- j4yav 6y agoYou almost had me there
- slfnflctd 6y agoThis exchange reads like a Fry & Laurie sketch to me.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y agoYou don't join clubs with the intention of dating. If you are, you're going about dating 100% wrong...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sarakayakomzin 6y agothis is so HN delusional that it's too hard to tell from sarcasm.
- yoz-y 6y agoI'd wager that one of the big variables is proximity. At college, you eat, go out, party, study and do all of the mundane stuff together with a close group of people. At work, after hours you may go get some drinks, but you are not going to go buy TP together.
- b0afc375b5 6y agoFor some reason I've had this long standing belief that love is just a function of proximity. I think I've subconsciously made it one of my goals in life to disprove this, by finding someone on the other side of the world. I'm not getting my hopes up though.
- matwood 6y ago> function of proximity. If you define proximity as spending time together IRL or virtually, then I agree.
- Ayesh 6y ago> finding someone on the other side of the world First hand experience is that it can be very rewarding if the wave lengths match. It opens a whole new world of experiences and thinking patterns. It takes a lot more commitment than, say, a relationship with someone from same college/town, so it takes more awareness about the fact.
- indigochill 6y agoI've heard a similar argument and I don't think it's entirely wrong, but I think the function is a little more complicated. Because when you spend enough time around anyone, you realize they suck (because everyone does). So some degree of grace is required as well to maintain love once the proximity factor has peaked.
- k__ 6y agoI think, it's about perceived proximity (car, train, and plane, help to lower that) and the kind of relationship you want. I have two girlfriends who live two train hours away from me. As the two implies, I'm not living a regular relationship, so I'm inclined to go to greater lengths when finding someone that fits.
- lordnacho 6y agoSimplest explanation seems to be when there's a bunch of mating-age humans in one place, some of them mate. You see this with educational institutions, work, sports clubs, and so on. What I don't see is that people join the institution with that market as an intention. At least I have a lot of friends and none of them have ever said they did anything other than perhaps a dance class in order to meet someone. Longer term commitments like university often end up being where people meet a partner, but don't seem like that was part of the purpose.
- coldtea 6y ago>What I don't see is that people join the institution with that market as an intention. It was a quite common idea in the upper middle class back in the day (let's say '20s to late 50s in the US with adjustments for countries in different stages of development up to very recently), somewhat after the initial women's liberation, but not so much so that women careers where not rare, that parents sent their girls to college not to study for a profession, but to snatch a husband.
- ycombinete 6y agoI knew a girl at university who was there to find a husband, and she did! In South Africa there is even a colloquial Afrikaans term for it: BA Man Soek, i.e. Bachelor of Arts in Finding a Husband. It is of course possible that this is/was a sexist idea, but I’m sure it’s a bit of both. Especially as a conservative woman seeking a housewife lifestyle, it makes sense to make yourself available in an environment where there is a high concentration of available men who will likely be quite successful.
- thendrill 6y agoDid the article mentions if there are difference when it comes to college preference. Would the chase of finding a mate at a finance program better than cold world studies for example?
- logicchains 6y ago>cold world studies Sorry, I Googled this but had no luck; what exactly are cold world studies?
- thendrill 6y agoEdit: sorry my autocorrected cold War to cold world It's a program part of Masters and bechelor degree in history. You know like IT- distribute systems. Example program https://worldhistory.columbia.edu/content/cold-war https://worldhistory.columbia.edu/content/cold-war
- heresie-dabord 6y agoWhere unattached adults meet, there will be ahem discovery and disclosure. But I think that its a serious mistake to get married without understanding the full financial responsibility and risk. Perhaps the educational system should make the teaching of this reality part of a mandatory curriculum of financial understanding. "Marriage is unnecessarily complicated. You can just find someone whom you hate and give that person a house." -- Pat Paulsen
- vehemenz 6y agoThe study uses data from Norway. Maybe this is a good choice because the relevant variables can be controlled for. On the other hand, the US has the most universities per capita, and students come from all over the world. Might this be one of the larger sources of heterogenous marriages as well?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bluedino 6y agoThis is why people send their kids to Christian college. The boys get their degrees in whatever, and the girls can do the teacher/nurse/marriage. They get to choose from another Christian from a “good family”
- magicroot75 6y agoThe old "MRS" degree
- smeej 6y agoHuh. Here I'd been thinking my classmates were there for the same reasons I was: The high-caliber education, top-tier faculty, abundant connections to other local schools (Boston area), and not just toleration of but encouragement toward my own spiritual and religious explorations at that stage in my life. A handful of my best friends even became Catholic priests, so I guess if their parents sent them there to marry, it didn't work out very well.
- FearNotDaniel 6y ago> A handful of my best friends even became Catholic priests, so I guess if their parents sent them there to marry, it didn't work out very well. Assuming the parents are authentic Catholics, they would send them there to find their vocation, whether that is marriage or holy orders. Seen through that lens, it worked out very well indeed.
- smeej 6y agoSure. My point was just counter- the dismissive parent post that treated Christian schools like a marriage market.
- bregma 6y agoWell, they ended up married to Jesus.
- smeej 6y ago
- TheAdamist 6y agoI went to an engineering college, 80-90% male at the time, good education, co-op program for good work experience. I think I missed out on a lot of the college experience,so I wound up here instead.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y agoI returned to school for comp sci past year and as an older student, I still feel like I got the "college experience" because I actively sought it out. I was also in a state that didn't care about covid so that helped a ton too. But, my experiences weren't with people at school, they were predominantly with people and randoms at bars you just talk to. Also dating apps as well.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tootahe45 6y agoWhere i studied there were maybe 2 girls max in all of my engineering classes, And all of the guys i met were just interested in video games and had no social lives (like myself). The social networking aspect of uni was the biggest joke of all.
- jl2718 6y agoThe best advice I can give is to date/marry/bond with someone as similar as possible to yourself. I know this is both sociopolitical anathema, and breaks the rules of attraction/neediness. The other option is a lifetime of frustration trying to understand why this person thinks/says/does every little thing. This is only fun when it’s inconsequential, and you both walk away, each thinking the other is so impressed that they want to be just like you. No. Prepare for anagnorisis. The opportunity for highly-similar pairing peaks in grad school. I believe this has more to do with graduate program success than the grad schooling itself. But you won’t take this advice. You will choose someone that makes you feel better about yourself, either because they need heroic superior you to fill some deficit in themselves, or because the relationship proves that in fact you are perfect with no such deficits. If you don’t recognize the full irony and impending disaster of that situation, I strongly advise reading any book on codependency.
- bombcar 6y agoA corollary of this is that third-party observers are often quite easily able to notice this, though advice is often ignored.
- eplanit 6y agoTrue wisdom here. Heed it, younger people!
- rossdavidh 6y agoMy wife is quite different than I am, in many ways. She was an arts major who lived in a punk rock house that had shows with out of town bands in the basement. I was an Electrical Engineering major who listened to a lot of prog rock. None of our mutual friends expected us to hook up. We have been together over 20 years, and the fact that we are different means we are more often able to complement each others' skill sets (not least in the raising of our daughter). Just one data point, of course, but there you are.
- jl2718 6y agoYou sound almost exactly alike. Music. School. Friends. These are all quite superficial, but it points to very similar patterns of thought and interest. You’ll see what I mean if you ever find yourself dating full strangers again.
- rossdavidh 6y agoJust one more way in which college supports the class society. But really, is this a surprise to anyone? Now what would be interesting would be to investigate if a one-year hiatus on in-person college causes marriage rates to drop in a few years.