This study examines how potential romantic partners in speed-dating encounters use gender to both proffer and formulate mate-preferences as a means of establishing affiliation. Drawing on a corpus of 36 speed-dating interactions, a sequential discursive psychological approach was used to analyze how gendered mate-preferences were initially elicited and formulated, as well as the interactional effects of mate-preferences that were designed to appear complicit versus resistant to gender conventionality. The findings reveal that both mate-preference solicitations and formulations were categorically gendered and were treated as incipient or expected, suggesting that gendering mate-preferences is a normative action in first encounters by potential romantic partners. Further, mate-preferences that were marked as conventional rarely promoted an environment of mutual affiliation, whereas mate-preferences that were formulated as resistant to gender-conventionality did tend to function as a preliminary for affective affiliation. The study reveals that the gendering of mate-preferences is a responsive social practice with an interactional design that has relational consequences for the ways potential romantic partners create connection.
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