ABSTRACT
Writing a review of literature on mate selection and premarital relationships is much more challenging now than it used to be. As recently as 1 to 2 decades ago, the literature to be included in such a review was well circumscribed. Studies were clearly aimed at understanding dating relationships, and samples usually were recruited because they fit into the premarital period of mate choice. In this era, however, when individuals believe that dating is passe´, form serial unions that may or may not be marriage-like prior to their first legal marriage, and formmultiple intermarital unions following one or more divorces, the behaviors that constitute mate selection are ambiguous. Researchers, too, seem to be influenced by the trend toward ambiguity, in that the phenomena of mating and dating are less well defined in the literature. As we attempted to identify the empirical papers for this chapter, it became apparent, for example, that current methodological practices, such as including cohabitors with marrieds in some studies and including them with daters in other studies, made it difficult to set the scope of the review. Ambiguity is apparent not only in the samples used to study these topics but also in the observational and statistical methods used to study them (for a fuller discussion, see Surra, Gray, Boettcher, Cottle, & Jarvis, 2002). For these reasons, we first strictly defined the purview of our search.
