Shifting Gender Differences in Human Mating Strategies and Partner Preferences: Evidence from Dutch Dating Advertisements, 1841 - 1995

Karin Wienholts, Radboud University Nijmegen
Saverio Minardi, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna
Paul Puschmann, Radboud University Nijmegen

This paper investigates gender differences in human mating strategies and partner preferences through a long-term historical analysis of Dutch dating advertisements published between 1841 and 1995. These advertisements constitute a unique historical source as they are personal statements in which individuals articulate both the ‘self’ and the preferred ‘other’, shaped by the social norms and constraints of their time, as well as individual preferences. Unlike conventional demographic sources, such as civil records, church registers or censuses, dating advertisements directly capture the intentions, priorities, and strategies of individuals navigating the partner market. Their recent large-scale digitization enables systematic quantitative research using large numbers of advertisements across extended historical periods. Drawing on Social Role Theory, which attributes sex differences in mating behaviour to socially constructed gender roles rather than biologically fixed dispositions, we will analyse patterns of self-descriptions and partner preferences by sex over time. For this, we use the structured variables from DUTCHMATCH, a recently built database containing 10,000 coded dating advertisements. We aim to examine how sex-differentiated elements of the self-descriptions and partner preferences evolved over time in response to shifting gender roles following the women’s movements, increased female labour market access and the First and Second Demographic Transition. We then apply quantitative and qualitative text analysis techniques to investigate shifts in the semantic content of the advertisements, tracing how changing gender roles are reflected in the emergence of new vocabulary and their meaning in an evolving dating market. Our findings illuminate how changes in the gendered division of labour drove changes in the search for an ideal partner. The study also demonstrates the value of dating advertisements as a rich, underused source for understanding long-term changes in the dating market and highlights the potential for future comparative research spanning social history, family sociology, historical demography, and computational text analysis.

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 Presented in Session 5. Fertility in Changing Contexts