Admissibility Before Preference

This preprint develops the foundational architecture of admissibility-first partner selection. Its central claim is that partner preferences often do not operate directly over the full socially available candidate pool. Instead, a prior process of viability assessment and admissibility formation narrows the field before preference-based ordering becomes decisively operative. The framework distinguishes four analytically separate stages: the socially available pool, admissibility formation, within-set preference activation, and observed matching outcomes. Admissibility is modeled as threshold-gated and sensitive to structural environment, regime type, anticipated time horizon, buffering, uncertainty, mismatch cost, and the legibility of viability-relevant traits. Five principal propositions are derived. First, admissibility is analytically prior to preference ordering. Second, longer and more binding anticipated horizons tend to tighten viability thresholds and contract candidate sets. Third, early-stage filtering becomes disproportionately dependent on fast proxy cues when long-horizon traits remain insufficiently observable. Fourth, romantic or self-selection systems and arranged or negotiated systems differ primarily in the location and visibility of viability work rather than in the presence or absence of thresholds. Fifth, hyper-individualised and thin-buffer environments may intensify feasibility filtering, concentrate matching opportunities, and widen exclusion margins without requiring malicious intent or moral defect as explanatory primitives. The paper positions the framework relative to preference research, assortative-mating and matching models, Mate Evaluation Theory, evolutionary accounts, and sociological theories of individualisation and privatised risk. Its intended contribution is not to deny preference causality, but to reorder explanation by distinguishing the formation of the serious candidate set from the ranking of candidates within that set. The paper further specifies empirical predictions, discriminating research designs, rival explanations, and explicit falsification conditions. It is intended as a bounded theory of pre-formation partner selection under non-coercive conditions, particularly where medium- or long-horizon coordination and commitment are plausible. Formal notation is representational rather than foundational. It is used to clarify dependency order, thresholds, constraints, and testable directional propositions. It does not imply that actors consciously perform numerical optimisation. This work is Paper I in the Admissibility-First Partner Selection research strand and forms part of Dyadic Systems, Relationships, and Family Formation (Project C) within the wider Structural Viability and Drift research programme.