Ask a family what they are looking for and you get a list: education, profession, height, community, city, sometimes an income bracket. Watch the same family decide, and almost none of it is what tipped them.
The stated list is a filter, not a reason
The list exists to make an impossible number of options manageable. It is doing a real job. But it describes who gets considered, not who gets chosen.
Families that insisted on a particular profession routinely say yes to someone in another one. Height requirements evaporate. The city becomes negotiable. What does not move is something almost nobody writes down.
What actually decides it
How the other family behaves when something goes slightly wrong. A delayed reply, a changed date, a misunderstanding. Families watch this closely and draw permanent conclusions from it.
Whether the two of them were comfortable together. Parents notice this faster than the couple does. Twenty minutes in a room tells them a great deal.
Whether the family felt respected. Not impressed — respected. Being kept waiting, being talked over, having questions brushed aside. These end more proposals than any mismatch on paper.
Whether the answers were straight. Every family has something less than ideal — a health matter, a business that struggled, a first marriage. Volunteering it early is almost always taken well. Discovering it later almost never is.
What barely matters, despite being on every list
Salary precision. Nobody has ever chosen between two proposals on the basis of a two-lakh difference.
A specific college. It matters as a signal and stops mattering the moment they meet.
The photograph, beyond a point. It gets someone considered. It has never once been why a family said yes after meeting.
If you are writing your own requirements
Try this instead of a list: describe the life you want in five years, then work backwards to what that actually needs. Most people discover their real requirements are two or three things, and the rest was inherited from someone else's list.
The most useful question a family can ask itself is: which of these would we drop, if everything else was right? Whatever survives that question is the real list.
And the one thing worth being strict about
Character, judged from how someone treats people who cannot do anything for them. It is the only item on any list that predicts the next forty years.