The public search for a spouse in Türkiye: İzdivaç advertisements in 1918 and marriage-oriented social media posts in 2025

Abstract

This article compares two sets of spouse-seeking texts from Türkiye: matrimonial advertisements published in the Ottoman Turkish periodical İzdivaç in 1918 and marriage-oriented posts shared on Facebook and Instagram in 2025. The aim is not to trace a continuous line of change across the intervening century, but to examine how marital intention, self-presentation and partner criteria were formulated in two different media settings. The 1918 corpus consists of 68 unique advertisements from the eleven identified issues of İzdivaç. The 2025 corpus consists of 75 unique social media posts selected from an initial pool of 90 publicly accessible posts after repeated or near-identical reposts were removed. The study uses comparative qualitative content analysis and close textual reading. It focuses on moral respectability, bodily expectations, economic security, cultural values and gendered marital roles. The comparison shows that both corpora rely on shared concerns such as respectability, seriousness, trust and suitability, but these concerns are expressed through different historical vocabularies and media conventions. In İzdivaç, marital eligibility is often tied to family background, moral propriety, occupation, property and formal address. In the 2025 posts, explicit seriousness of marriage intention, trustworthiness, religious or cultural compatibility, economic readiness and the avoidance of unserious relations are more prominent. The article contributes to family history and media history by treating spouse-seeking as a textual practice shaped by the public formats through which it circulates, while also emphasising the limits of both print and social media sources.