Abstract

Building on a reconstruction of a Bourdieusian approach to mate choice and using a series of different semi-structured interviews conducted with online dating users from a major German dating platform, I will describe this context as a modern unified symbolic goods market, where users and their symbolic goods become particularly visible, assessable, and classifiable. In doing so, parallels are drawn to Bourdieu’s historical case studies of a rural partner market and French society between the 50s and the 90s and phenomena as observed on this modern digital partner market. The findings will shed light on the different ways in which practices of looking for and interacting with potential mates are structured, and how these practices jointly contribute to a highly stratified partner market.