From Confused to Confident

By Sonia Moghe

Finding Your Spouse on the Web: Our Generation's Arranged Marriages

The phrase “an arranged marriage” has always evoked Bollywood-esque images of a man seeing his future wife for the first time at their wedding as he pulls the covering away from her face. Several generations ago, the idea was that young people who didn’t really know each other got married and there was no question of choice. Today, in most families, it’s not quite that extreme, but there is Shaadi.com: our generation’s closest thing to an arranged marriage.

Some people might think that Shaadi.com is exactly like dating websites like eHarmony or Match.com, which make you set up a profile with your pictures and information about yourself. The difference is: Shaadi.com discourages dating. The website’s customer relations department closely

monitors profiles and there’s a long verification process to go through so that Shaadi.com knows your profile is legit. Not to mention, they will actually kick you off the website if they find that your profile “does not clearly state that you are looking for matrimony.” I created a profile on Shaadi.com last year to conduct research for this piece. I posted a picture on the profile and in the “About Me” section, I simply put: “I am a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism interested in talking to people about arranged marriages.” Over the next two months, I received messages from hundreds of males, and their families. I told people I was working on this project and, surprisingly, found quite a few people who would spill the personal details of their spouse-search with me.

Mostly, I interviewed males about why they were looking for a wife on the website. They liked being able to look for women in their area in a logical and organized way. Some used filters to weed out people who had characteristics they didn’t want to deal with. Things like a different religion, the lack of a highly professional position or residency outside of the country were some of the criteria most likely to be filtered out.

People I knew were shocked that American-raised, educated, good-looking and sociable South Asians would meet someone on Shaadi.com, talk to them for a few weeks and decide to get married just months after meeting. I began to wonder if this was the modern day arranged marriage.

I grew up thinking that marriage is based on love and passion. I watched movies like Sleepless in Seattle, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, where Hanks’ character loses his wife. A year after his wife’s death, when he still hasn’t started dating, his son calls into a radio show and tells his dad’s story, prompting bags full of mail from women who want to take Hanks’ wife’s place. Hanks’ son asks him if he’s going to read any of the hundreds of letters from women who want to be his wife. Hanks says, “No, because this is not how it’s done. I’d much rather see somebody I like, get a feeling about them and ask them if they want to have a drink.” That is how I thought marriages were made. You meet, there’s a spark, you get to know each other, fall in love and decide to spend the rest of your lives together.

Divorce rates are very telling though. In America, 45 to 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, whereas only 7 percent of South Asian marriages end in divorce, according to census studies done in both countries. Clearly, South Asians are doing something that makes their marriages last longer. As I inch deeper into my twenties, I’ve become more curious about what it is about the South Asian way of marriage that makes a union work. Was it the fact that parents chose your mate? Was it the mentality that marriage is the union of two families, a bond you can’t break?

I really wanted to find out how couples who knew so little about each other could get married and stay married their whole lives. One of those couples is my parents, who have been married for 25 years this year. The answer, it seems, had been in front of my face for decades: People who get married and stay married for their entire lives do so because they both wanted to. It doesn’t matter if you find your partner on a dating website, a matrimonial website or at a bar; any situation can end in a lifelong union if both people truly want to be committed, for better or worse.

Perhaps the success of Shaadi.com is in its name. By joining a website whose name means “marriage”, you’re potentially weeding out people who are not ready to get married. And finding someone who has marriage as the same end goal as you is half the battle.

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