Assortative Mating Among Dutch Married and Cohabiting Same‐Sex and Different‐Sex Couples

Abstract

The authors compared male and female samesex and different-sex couples in the Netherlands with respect to age and educational homogamy. Because many same-sex couples in the Netherlands are married, differences between married and cohabiting couples were analyzed for all 3 groups. Analyses of data from the Dutch Labor Force Surveys 2001Surveys -2007 showed that male same-sex couples are less homogamous in terms of age and education than different-sex couples. Female same-sex couples are less homogamous in terms of age, but not in terms of education. No meaningful differences were found between married couples and cohabiting couples. Partnership status appeared less important than the sex composition of the couple. Given the relatively tolerant climate toward homosexuals in the Netherlands, the similarity of the results with those yielded by studies conducted in the United States may be considered striking.In this study, we used large-scale random samples to describe patterns in mate selection of male and female same-sex couples in

Comparing same- and different-sex relationship dynamics: Experiences of young adults in Taiwan

“…Second, since their unions are nontraditional, individuals with a samesex orientation are thought to have less conventional preferences for partners, leading to greater tolerance of partner heterogeneity (Potârcă, Mills, and Neberich 2015). At the same time, however, other researchers argue that same-sex couples might be more homogeneous than different-sex unions because how they relate to each other is not affected by the gender hierarchy in society, resulting in their more egalitarian preferences (Verbakel and Kalmijn 2014). Empirically, same-sex unions are found to be more heterogamous with respect to age in a few European countries and the United States, but this pattern does not extend to their educational levels (Andersson et al 2006;Schwartz and Graf 2009;Verbakel and Kalmijn 2014).…”

Partner market opportunities and union formation over the life course—A comparison of different measures

“…Therefore, we can assume a preference for partners from the same ethnicity (McPherson, Smith‐Lovin, & Cook, ). With respect to education, empirical evidence in many studies points to assortative mating and hence supports the idea of educational homophily (Blossfeld, ; Krzyżanowska & Mascie‐Taylor, ; Schwartz & Mare, ; Verbakel & Matthijs, ). However, in gender‐traditional societies with a low female participation in the labour force and a gender‐specific division of household and paid work, women's educational attainment is less important, whereas in dual‐earner societies, men increasingly might prefer women with a high educational attainment (Blossfeld, : 523).…”

Educational and age assortative mating in China: The importance of marriage order

“…In fact, when we compared first-married and remarried people who entered their current marriage at the same age (i.e., by controlling for age at marriage) in Table 3, the latter were more likely to marry a spouse who was older than themselves. Unfortunately, age at marriage is often unaccounted for in prior research on age assortative mating (Shafer 2013a;Verbakel and Kalmijn 2014). We urge scholars to control for age at marriage when analyzing marital sorting on age, as both individual preferences and marriage market conditions may change over the life course (England and McClintock 2009;Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012;Qian and Preston 1993).…”

“…To measure age assortative mating, we calculated husband-wife age gap based on respondents' and their spouses' year of birth and respondents' gender. Following Verbakel and Kalmijn (2014), we grouped the husband-wife age gap, which ranged between -34 and 34, into five categories to capture age hypogamy, homogamy, and hypergamy: (1) husband younger than wife by 3 or more years ([-34, -3]), (2) husband-wife age difference within 2 years ([-2, 2], reference), (3) husband older than wife by 3 to 5 years ([3, 5]), (4) husband older than wife by 6 to 10 years ([6, 10]), and (5) husband older than wife by 11 or more years ([11, 34]). Among the respondents in the category of -34 to -3 (husband younger than wife by 3 or more years; age hypogamy), 55% had a husband-wife age gap of -3 years, and another 23% and 9%, respectively, had an age gap of -4 and -5 years, whereas the husband-wife gap of -34 represented only one extreme case in our sample.…”