Desirability, Matching, and the Illusion of Exchange in Partner Selection

Elizabeth McClintock, Stanford University

Scholars have long been interested in exchange and matching (assortative mating) in romantic partner selection. But many analyses of exchange, particularly those that examine beauty, fail to control for matching and/or consider only gendered patterns of exchange. Because traits that are desirable in mates are positively correlated between partners and within individuals, ignoring matching produces spurious evidence of exchange. I use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health Romantic Pair Sample, a large (N = 1,502), nationally representative probability sample of dating, cohabiting and married couples, to investigate whether desirable characteristics are traded for different desirable traits, net of matching. I revisit findings from a variety of previously published studies and find that controlling for matching eliminates nearly all evidence of exchange.