Beyond Marriage: The Evolution of Partner Preferences and Dating Strategies in the Wake of Changing Relationship Forms in the Netherlands, 1945-1995

Karin Wienholts, Radboud University Nijmegen
Lisa Hoek, Rad
Paul Puschmann, Radboud University Nijmegen

This paper examines the evolution of partner preferences and mate-seeking strategies in the post-war Netherlands in the wake of dramatic shifts in union formation, especially the transition from near-universal marriage to diverse relationship forms including cohabitation, living-apart-together (LAT) relationships, and same-sex partnerships. The study is grounded in the Second Demographic Transition framework, which links changing intimate relationships to the rise of post-materialist values, increasing individual autonomy, and growing gender equality, developments further accelerated by secularization and the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. Characteristic features include the postponement of marriage and childbearing, rising cohabitation, same-sex partnerships and divorce, and a stronger emphasis on higher-order needs such as self-actualization. Transformations in women’s educational attainment and labour force participation, paired with gradual shifts in men’s household roles, further reshaped the foundations of intimate life. Building on this theoretical framework, we explore the association between partner preferences, dating strategies, and different relationship forms, drawing on DUTCHMATCH, a database of 10,000 coded dating advertisements from 19th- and 20th-century Dutch newspapers. Whereas traditional research on partner choice has focused primarily on marriages recorded in civil and church registers or censuses, dating advertisements offer direct insight into individuals’ preferences, mate-seeking strategies, and desired relationship forms before pairing occurred. Mass digitization of newspapers has made it possible to automatically extract large numbers of such advertisements for quantitative research. Using this source and an innovative computational approach, we first investigate who the pioneers were in articulating alternative relationship forms in dating advertisements. We examine how their self-descriptions and partner preferences differed from those of heterosexual marriage seekers. Second, employing Natural Language Processing techniques, we explore what language patterns were used to express different relationship forms and how these textually relate to mate-seeking strategies and partner preferences, and whether the interrelationship changed over time.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 133. Union Formation and Dissolution in Historical Perspective