Is it Easier for Some People to Get Married?
I think so. Let’s spell it out.
If you want to get married, you want to be sharing intimacy with one person forever. Even if you are polyamorous, if you are wanting to get married, you want to share intimacy for life with at least one other person.
What makes this easier or harder?
If you want to practice a very specific religion in your household that few people are part of, that makes it harder.
If you want an unusually specific number of children (for example, 0 or 1 on one end, or on the other end, 7+) .
If you have a specific kind of sexual practice you really need or really want, or you get bored (for example, BDSM, or needing somebody much taller than you to get off, or needing somebody with really nice feet).
And so the probabilities of people matching your basic criteria decrease the more needs you have to do the thing you want to do as an explicit part of the intimacy you want to be doing. Imagine the set of people you could, in theory, marry. Every non‑negotiable cuts that pool down.
This doesn’t include things like location, job, allergies, food preferences…
This is just about the non-negotiable elements of intimacy.
For example if you are gay, then marrying someone of the same gender would not be possible. And all those people are eliminated.
And so for the original question — is it easier for some people to get married than others?
I would say so.
Alice wants: sex once a week, a few kids. A guy slightly taller who makes more money than her. Christian.
Bethany wants: Somebody who has left Christianity, but wants to honor certain aspects she cares about in spirit in community with other people, no kids, wants to marry a woman close to her age
Bethany doesn’t have “higher standards”; she just mathematically have fewer possible matches.
Generally, the people who “have it harder” notice it, and know that it’s not just “being picky” or “having high standards.” They might have even been married before, or have been engaged, and it did not work because of one of these specific things that they tried hard to overlook.
I think “being hard to marry” in this specific way is much different from “being picky” or “having high standards” because you cannot loosen your standards in order to “have more options” and you cannot “be more open minded to somebody else” by dating a lot and just meeting somebody.
If you really need to wrestle with somebody and feel overpowered to feel loved, that’s going to be hard to change. If you really just like throwing a dinner party once a month and then going to sleep as your social life, that’s going to be hard to change.
Knowing which of these are really important to you, younger, can probably save a lot of trouble around dating somebody you really really like for a long time but who doesn’t meet your basic criteria for a long-term union at the opportunity cost of other long-term unions.