The Ideational Turn in Assortative Mating

Research on assortative mating has long documented how individuals sort into partnerships by ascribed characteristics such as race/ethnicity and achieved markers such as education. Yet an ideational turn, I argue, is underway in three respects. First, about existence, individuals sort on values, beliefs, and life orientations that bear directly on how partnership and family life are organized, such as fertility intentions and gender role attitudes, in ways not reducible to status, as emerging evidence shows. Second, about change, I hypothesize that ideational characteristics carry growing weight in partner selection, a shift grounded in the weakening of normative constraints, the prioritization of self‐actualization in intimate life, and the rising heterogeneity of values within status groups, yet tempered by certain obstacles. Third, about scholarship, a field oriented toward status sorting must systematically engage these developments, a task made feasible by new tools such as survey experiments and digital trace data from dating platforms. Finally, I discuss the implications of ideational sorting for family life, social stratification, and demographic transitions, and set out an agenda for this nascent but consequential field.