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[Urist Tilaturist]

Maybe I should raise my child cap a little. Still, I never had many problems making a huge population bulge in forts, though that world had dwarf civilisations still alive so it is not really the same, and it was in a past version where breeding may have been faster. Casualties among children were actually quite low since they did not do dangerous jobs - they only really died in tantrum spirals, and even then tended to disproportionately survive since the fortress guard could stop them more easily.

[utunnels]

I locked two lovers and all their pets in the same room with a table, a chair, a bed, a barrel of wine, a barrel of roasts and some furnitures.
All they did were admiring all the furnitures and the door and the owner of the room felt proud of having his own fine bed.
 

[Urist Tilaturist]

They must have been very anti commitment. I think dwarves who are lovers should be more likely to marry, since all dwarven babies must be legitimate and there is a strong drive to reproduce given the death rate of dwarves.

[Broseph Stalin]

I locked two lovers and all their pets in the same room with a table, a chair, a bed, a barrel of wine, a barrel of roasts and some furnitures.
All they did were admiring all the furnitures and the door and the owner of the room felt proud of having his own fine bed.
 

There's something like a 20% chance that a dwarf will go to lover but won't marry.

[Urist Tilaturist]

...and this chance should really be much lower given dwarven culture.

[Loud Whispers]

Maybe I should raise my child cap a little. Still, I never had many problems making a huge population bulge in forts, though that world had dwarf civilisations still alive so it is not really the same, and it was in a past version where breeding may have been faster. Casualties among children were actually quite low since they did not do dangerous jobs - they only really died in tantrum spirals, and even then tended to disproportionately survive since the fortress guard could stop them more easily.

It's less about making huge population booms, it's more about making a sustainable population. This is very much a focus for a long lasting Fort as this is the kind of Fort in which high casualty rates will dissuade migrants from entering your hellhole (if you haven't had this happen yet, they literally refuse to go your outpost if too many Dwarves have died) or in which children are already the mainstay of your Fort and you're thinking 12 years ahead. The Fort in which children are the mainstay of mine is one in which there has been continuous siege for over 2 decades so replenishment by migrants is physically impossible, it's on the extreme end of reasons why to have children - necessity. As the smallest around, being the first to rush to deconstruction jobs (and any subsequent accidents from cave ins) and the only Dwarves that cannot wear armour or receive formal military training can mean they end up in serious trouble, especially if they follow their parents around to potentially dangerous places.
Though you're right, usually they're perfectly safe from snatchers and other predators if they're burrowed in a daycare centre or the Fort's heart. I'm keeping all the 2nd gen Dwarves unmarried so that when the 1st gen die I can pair up the survivors to make the 3rd gen. So far it seems a pair to a bedroom with booze and dinner is the definitive method and all round best; small dining rooms produce many relations between Dwarves and runs the risk of setting up the Fort for a perfect tantrum spiral whereas keeping the relationships between the couple in question and keeping meeting areas/dining halls large guarantees a minimal Dwarven relationships to baby rearing ratio.

[taptap]

I have the same experience as utunnels, no interaction at all when I put two lovers in a honeymoon suite and these are dwarves that did interact before (that is how they became lovers and did occasionally afterwards). As I have trouble to get a single marriage despite many relations (probably 10 couples in 24 dwarves) I doubt commitment is the only issue. Did you really - in a recent version of DF after emotion rewrite - just lock in a prospective couple and they eventually married?

[Urist Tilaturist]

I usually turn off deconstruct jobs for children on DT and just leave them running around the fort, also in aboveground areas to stop cave adaptation.

[Gigaz]

Has anybody experience with arranged marriages for dwarfs?

Dwarfs won't consider someone for marriage who is widowed, married, in love, wrong age, wrong gender/orientation or too closely related. This often leaves only 2-3 possible matches for a dwarf. Their chances to meet are slim.
I tried hand-picking suitable matches and locking them together, but only one out of four made it to the lover state. That was in DF 2012, and perhaps the honeymoon hotel was not designed very well...

[Urist Tilaturist]

Dwarves remarrying some time after the death of a partner would be a good addition. In the past, widows and widowers usually remarried fairly quickly since the whole family often needed to work together to survive. It would also make dwarf breeding far less frustrating.

[Badger Storm]

Speaking of marriage, I got quite the shock this morning.  In a wave of immigrants, I got a married miner who was in her eighties.

Her husband?  Fifty-three years old.

For some reason, I just keep attracting all the weird families.

[pisskop]

Was she widowedand then remarried?  In worldgen, at least, they do that.

[taptap]

"I've also setup a series of "social traps" where dwarfs are trapped in pits with exits hooked up to a timing belt. This forces the dwarfs to interact for a set period of time on a 1x1 tile. You can set up some tunnels over multiple z levels to link the social traps to various dwarfs bedrooms to increase social interaction of certain dwarfs. Basically my leader gets intentionally dropped down there a lot which is useful to actually train his social skills (does anyone else find their leader never increases social skills?)."

More information on your social traps ravendarksky?

[taptap]

At the tender age of 105 and 96 two of my starting dwarves finally married, in the 32nd year of Ozornil. (Fort was originally in 40.14, later updated to 40.19) Weirdly this feels like an achievement these days.

Didn't do anything similar to the bunker experiment again, but I kept the redesigned areas, had a massive reduction of available social space and later even the barracks in the same room with increasing idleness for years. + During the last decade a social trap (as small statue garden in a 1-tile wide dead end). At the moment of marriage the dwarves were standing in their adjacent rooms watching each other through a window.

Since I run with very low population cap of 24 earlier, 32 now, I may have lacked some "critical mass" for socialising. The married dwarves were romantically involved for over 30 years and also are the starting dwarves with highest skill gains in conversationalist (now skilled), although the bridegroom is also the grumpiest of my dwarves (dour as a rule) and was a long-term patient of the local stress reduction program.

P.S. A few month later the second marriage, the duchess and the duchess consort. (Interestingly just before both marriages I had freed all social rooms, only meeting hall is active.)

[Larix]

Those are good, although not exactly encouraging news. While it seems to verify that marriage takes _very_ long to happen, at least it can happen at all.

In my tentative real-wagon tests, dwarfs could be stuck for a whole year pretty much in one big pile and would maybe talk to one other dwarf once a week. They might have gotten more socialising in at the start (with _fewer_ dwarfs) while switching between jobs and idling and less while being cooped up completely idle.  Socialising is atrociously slow since the emotion rewrite, but i didn't feel like spending much time working out which constellation was less atrocious.

If attributes/skills play a role for socialising speed/intensity, giving all dwarfs military training (which boosts a few soul attributes) may or may not help. Who knows, perhaps observer skill is beneficial - maybe dwarfs need some mad skillz to realise the misshapen smelly heap of old rags, vomit, grime and tangled hair in the corner of the dining room is a fellow dwarf and potential romantic partner?