Old Dating Research Shows How Personality Is Increasingly Trumping Money

About the episode

In our search for love, we look more and more at someone’s personality and less and less at someone’s financial situation. At least: in prosperous countries.

The researchers studied personal ads placed in newspapers between 1950 and 1995 in Canada, the United States, France and India. They analyzed the choice of words and identified four themes that came up the most: personality, financial situation, appearance and tastes.

They saw that personality played an increasingly important role at this time and financial status an increasingly small role, especially after the 1960s. Except in India. There, someone’s financial situation became more and more important after the 1970s, while the wishes regarding personality remained the same. And this trend was more apparent in ads posted by women than in ads written by men.

According to the researchers, this trend is perfectly in line with the The pyramid of needs theory that materialistic needs must be satisfied before immaterial needs become important. In India, these initial needs were probably not yet sufficiently satisfied.

If so at a later date, researchers expect personality to top the wish list in India as well.

Read more about research here: Personal finances increasingly play second fiddle to personality, lonely hearts study finds.