我们研究了代际重叠经济的稳定状态，即单身人士寻找配偶。在我们的模型经济中，男人和女人都能活很多年，他们在生育能力、收入和生存几率上都有所不同。这三个特征与年龄有关，是决定性的。单身人士是随机相遇的。他们提出当他们当前匹配的期望值超过剩余单身的期望值时。如果双方都求婚了，会面就会以婚姻告终。婚姻一直持续到死亡将他们分开，寡妇和鳏夫永远不会再婚，人们没有任何其他经济决策。在我们的模范经济中，人们结婚是因为他们看重陪伴、生儿育女以及与配偶分享收入。匹配函数依赖于内生的单性别比。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.