I'm pleased that folks found this interesting, and a little surprised not to see other observations on marriage behavior. I think I've at least learned how to set up manipulated pairings. The organic relationship developments through normal fort interactions are more interesting story-wise, although most of those I've seen have been in early fort development where there are fewer meeting areas in my forts, and more likelihood of the population having idlers because their industries aren't up and roaring yet, and there's less to haul. That, and recently matured youth who made friends as children and haven't settled into civilian jobs yet (thus still idle), or meet up with a childhood friend at another childhood friend's party. It really does appear to depend on repeat interactions, so unless dwarfs idle a lot (in the same meeting area) and aren't off on Individual Combat Drills, it can be quite some time between conversations with friends or lovers to advance the relationship in my forts.
Zivilin - I admit to being nervous about wiki'ing after just this little experiment, without some corroboration, but I may monkey around with this more.
You should see if a lowered mood or bodily harm has an effect on relationship fromation
I set things up for my test to optimize on mood as I could, assuming that better moods would be conducive to relationship formation and the emotional stability of dwarfs sealed in tight quarters for a year. The bodily harm would be a bit harder to test, but one could try for lowered mood through not providing dining hall, statue garden, and room quality boosts, perhaps with lower quality food and monotonous booze. What I found with the sealed-off dating game subjects was that all had negative thoughts from sleeping without a proper room, worn or tattered clothing, not enough dining chairs and sometimes losing a friend or relative to tragedy from outside forces. The combination of nice (not top rate) dining hall, admiring tastefully arranged furniture, making a friend, talking to a friend, not to mention caught up in new romance -> talked to lover and then married -> talked to the spouse thoughts kept them pretty happy.
Very thorough research and interesting to read, well done.
Something else that might be worth looking into is whether age plays a role in how fast dwarves begin romances.
I didn't see any difference in behavior based on the actual age of participants. Hundred year-olds matched with each other in the same way as 20-year-olds, when available. Faster, actually, in my test since I had fewer older dwarfs who were still alive. I should have specified that the young adults who are still single are all either dwarfs assigned to the "32 not in the test," in groups with partners ten-plus years older than them, or participants in the "open burrow" whose similarly burrowed eligible partners hooked up with non-test candidates they met in the main dining room. I left many youth who had siblings already participating in the test out of burrows. (I did have one burrow where half the men and half the women were siblings, but they paired off with their non-related burrow companions the same as all the other sealed test groups.)
Wow, somebody actually spent time on dorfs that wasn't an attempt to create a new way to maim dorfs?
No, this was an attempt to create new dwarves to maim.
They'll maim each other very nicely during the tantrum spiral that'll happen when even one of them kicks the bucket.
Not really. If I understand right, they're in isolated pairs. That should contain the tantrum spiral quite nicely.
Only some of the participants were in isolated pairs. The "open burrow" of course was open to the fort, and had a lot of friendship developments. Some of the closed burrows contained only two, while others contained 4-8 dwarfs (all of whom paired off eventually, except when age difference came into play). As it happens, some of the participants have met with unfortunate accidents and serious unhappiness did ensue - but then the unhappy/miserable dwarfs talked to their friends and spouses, sometimes parents or siblings, and got over it.