For both households, a marriage is an opportunity to establish new friendships or to strengthen old ones, and at the same time to build or maintain prestige. Household heads are therefore likely to choose new affines with care, a boy's father no less than a girl's. A boy's father can conceal his caution more easily because he holds the initiative, whereas a girl's father who is unwilling is placed in the position of refusing; though a refusal is normally expressed indirectly and tactfully, by making difficult conditions.
Normally, a man looking for a bride for his son moves outward through a series of concentric circles, beginning with his brothers' households, turning next to other close kin, then to neighbours and co-villagers and finally to strangers in other villages; or rather he moves along the chains of social relationships that happen to be open to him, choosing the closest girl who is both suitable and available. Women are more active than men in speculating and gossiping about marriages, and a wife's social net-work is as important as her husband's. The chain may well lead directly, through kinship, to another village. To give one example among many, a man gave his daughter to his sister's husband's sister's son. Both the linking marriages were between villages, so that Sakaltutan established a new link with one village through an old link with another.
In quite a number of cases, younger siblings had married into the families of their elders' affines. In two cases, three such marriages had taken place between two families. One man had exchanged a widowed younger sister for the widowed mother of a poor neighbour, and another had exchanged a daughter by his first marriage for a young second wife. Occasionally, a widow with a child marries a widower with a child. These children are expected to marry each other and remain in the parental household, and in several cases had actually done so.
A close kinswoman is not only easier to find; she may also be easier to fit into the household, since she will already have established relationships with the members, especially with her new mother-in-law.