我们研究了重叠代际经济的稳定状态，即单身者寻找配偶。在我们的模式经济中，男人和女人都能活很多年，他们在生育能力、收入和生存可能性上有所不同。这三个特征与年龄有关，而且是确定的。单身人士随机见面。当他们当前配对的期望值超过了保持单身的期望值时，他们就会提出建议。如果双方都求婚，会面就会以结婚告终。婚姻持续到死亡将他们分开，寡妇和鳏夫从不再婚，人们不做任何其他的经济决定。在我们的模式经济中，人们结婚是因为他们看重友谊、生儿育女和与配偶分享收入。匹配功能依赖于内生的单一性别比例。我们的模型经济只有两个自由参数:搜索摩擦和生育子女的效用份额。 We choose their values to match the median ages of first-time brides and grooms. We show that modeling the marriage decision in this simple way is sufficient to account for the age distributions of ever and never married men and women, for the probabilities of marrying a younger bride and a younger groom, and for the age distributions of first births observed in the United States in the year 2000. The previous literature on this topic claims that marriage is a waiting game in which women are choosier than men, and old and rich pretenders outbid the young and poor ones in their competition for fecund women. In this article we tell a different story. We show that their shorter biological clocks make women uniformly less choosy than men of the same age. This turns marriage into a rushing game in which women are willing to marry older men because delaying marriage is too costly for women. Our theory predicts that most of the gender age difference at first marriage will persist even if the gender wage-gap disappears. It also predicts that the advances in the reproductive technologies will play a large role in reducing the age difference at first marriage.