In a small community, simply finding somebody suitable takes so much effort that families sometimes treat it as the finish line. It is not. Shared background makes many things easier and predicts none of the things a marriage actually runs on.
What background does give you
A great deal, and it should not be dismissed. The same food, the same Christmas, the same church, the same experience of being asked where you are really from. Nothing needs translating.
That is a genuine advantage and it is why families search as hard as they do.
What it does not give you
Whether they are kind. Whether they are honest when it costs them something. Whether they will be there when something goes badly wrong. Whether their family will treat you well.
Two people from the same street in Bow Barracks can be completely unsuited to each other.
What to look at instead, once background is established
How they treat people who can do nothing for them. The waiter, the driver, the domestic help. This one signal outperforms everything else.
Whether they can say "I don't know". People who cannot admit uncertainty do not handle a difficult marriage well.
How they speak about their previous relationships and their family. Listen for whether anybody else is ever partly right.
What an ordinary Tuesday looks like. Marriage is mostly ordinary Tuesdays, and a description of one tells you more than any account of ambitions.
Whether they ask you anything. A person who talks for an hour and asks you nothing has shown you the next forty years.
The trap specific to a small community
Because suitable people are scarce, there is pressure — from family, and internally — to accept a match on the grounds that another may not come along.
That pressure is real and the scarcity is real. But a marriage entered because the alternative was waiting is a hard thing to live inside, and the community is not so small that there is genuinely only one person.
Background gets somebody onto the list. It should never be the reason they come off it.