Offspring and parent preferences for a spouse or in-law in an arranged marriage context

Abstract

Parental influence over mate choice and marriage is a norm across many cultures and throughout human history; however, more attention has been given to preferences of the mating individuals than to the preferences of parents selecting a son- or daughter-in-law. Using data collected in Nepal, a culture with a tradition of arranged marriages, we compare the preferences of unmarried adults and parents of unmarried adults using a budget allocation task in which respondents allocated two budgets (high and low) to design their ideal spouse or in-law from a set of 14 traits. To compare overall similarities and differences in allocations across all 14 traits, we calculated the Mahalanobis Distance for each dyad type (father-son, father-daughter, mother-son, and mother-daughter) for high and low budgets separately. Parents and offspring disagreed more in high budget allocations than in low budget allocations, indicating that they may agree more on the minimally necessary traits in a spouse/in-law. Parents and offspring showed the largest divergence in allocations over same caste/ethnicity (preferred more by parents) and physical attractiveness (preferred more by offspring), in line with previous comparisons of parent and offspring preferences. Differences in the preferences of parents and offspring were at least as large as differences in preferences between men and women in this sample, indicating that parent-offspring disagreement is substantial and should be given more consideration in the literature on mate choice. Additional research is needed to investigate how parents and offspring negotiate their preferences in arranged marriage contexts.