Young-Spouse Selection and Girl's Marriage: Studying the Demographic Effect

This paper's objective is to study the delay in male's marriage and their age-selection patterns its effects on female's marriage delay which would increase the risk of remaining single in girls. We have utilized here the data obtained from the general socio-economic census of 2001. The main idea of the paper is that in addition to problems which are usually cited as prohibiting the young from marrying, there is another one that affects the marriage market. This is what we call the modes of spouse selection in terms of age. The data show that as the male's age increases at their first marriage so do that of the females. Moreover, along such a line, it follows that the distance of marriage age grows between the sexes. The analyses show that young-spouse selection in late generations of males is 67% more common than marrying same-age or older-age spouses. The findings have clearly indicated that a delay in the male marriage is followed by a delay in the female marriage. On the other hand, considering a male's preference of marrying a younger spouse, such a tendency is followed by a demographic event: a marked reduction in marriage probability of older-age single females, which in other words can be stated as an increase in probability risk of females remaining single.