The Marriage Web, Part III of III (read part I or part II)

A few years ago, Deepti Paul was a 26-year-old film editor from the Bronx, New York. She had a job editing for Showtime but was starting to feel the pressure to get married.

“After 28, you’re a spinster,” she says.

So she did what any American who was trying to meet someone would do. She got on Match.com.

“Indian people don’t date. This is not a thing we learn how to do,” she said. “No one ever told us a social life is supposed to lead to a relationship. They don’t ever go out individually. I didn’t really know any other way to meet people. I don’t understand how to talk to someone at a bar and take them home.”

She did eventually meet up with a South Asian man on Match.com. They had been talking online for a couple of weeks and decided to meet in front of a Manhattan McDonalds and go from there one night after work. After meeting each other, the man slipped inside the McDonald’s to use the restroom. Deepti waited outside, but the man never came back out from the McDonald’s, which she later discovered had two entrances. She later e-mailed him, and he responded, “Sorry, I only date models.”

Photo by Rodrigo Torres

Deepti realized she was trying to date an Indian man to prove to her parents that she was “doing it their way,” she says. She even joined KeralaMatrimony.com, a site that matches people from the Kerala region of India. According to Deepti, there, she was bombarded by a lot of “stupid e-mails” from people who didn’t know “how to write in English.” Also, she let her parents send her to India one summer to meet a slew of prospective suitors and their families. But the meetings were never alone, never for more than a few hours, and at the end she was always asked right away if she wanted to marry the guy.

She tries to explain the mentality that drives successful, hardworking South Asian children raised in America to hand off the decision of whom they marry to their parents.
“Parents will take care of my love life, I’ll take care of my professional life,” she says. “I feel like a lot of Indian kids don’t know how to date because they weren’t allowed to. That’s why I think arranged marriage has lived for so long.”

After going through the ordeal of suitors and being pressured to decide whether or not she wanted to marry someone after a short meeting with the two families, Deepti is now getting married to an Irish man from Belfast.

Even with all of the astrological, blood type and salary information that’s listed on people’s matrimonial profiles, it’s still difficult to tell exactly what is going on in a person’s life.

Take Sameer, for example. He’s 25, attending medical school in the Caribbean Islands, but doing his last year in Brooklyn. He has his profile set to filter out any girl who is taller than 5’5” or has a complexion darker than his. His profile states how much he makes, what his religion is and what his parents do – it’s the same kind of biodata that helped his parents get married nearly 30 years ago.

What you might not know about Sameer is that he has been dating a girl for the past four years. She is a girl who would have been filtered out if they had met on Shaadi.com because he is hoping to find someone who is more educated than she is.

“If she knew about this, she’d be pretty upset,” he says. “Things aren’t going great. She’s pushing for me to make the next step and commit.”

The thing is, Sameer does want to commit, just not to her. So he spends a few minutes each day checking his profile to see who has responded or expressed interest in him.

“If I don’t meet somebody, I might end up with her,” he says.

He’s looking for someone to start fresh with, someone whom he can marry and get to know before there is too much of a history. He thinks that many Western “love marriages” fail because couples get to know each other too much before they get married, and when they do get married, the relationship changes and they long for they way it used to be.

“The arranged marriages – it sucks because the passion and the love isn’t really there. It’s a learned passion, it’s not really true. Because of that, nothing really fades. It’s a good thing too. Nothing fades away.”

To him, using matrimonial sites in the way he does – to get to know someone a little bit before getting married – he’s combining the “biodata” of his parents’ culture and the dating of his American culture, all in hopes of creating a match that will never end in divorce.

Like most of the others on the site, Shanto – the young, American-raised Bengali man getting his MBA in New York City – also considers himself in charge of his own fate. He doesn’t necessarily believe in matching people up by their astrological signs – another part of the profile Shaadi.com makes its members answer in detail.

The science of astrology is something many Hindus place their faith in. Hindu monk Ghadadhara Pandit Dasa has spent the last nine years of his life as a monk and has seen several relationships that were started after a pair was determined to have matching astrological signs.

“For a lot of people, this is a much more practical way of going about finding someone than spending six months to a year of emotions and time and energy and then finding out that that wasn’t the right person,” he says.

For Hindus, it’s more than just whether you are a Pisces or a Gemini. Shaadi.com – like any astrologer – asks you where and at what time (down to the minute) you were born.

“Who we are emotionally and our mentality towards things in life is pretty much determined by who we were in our previous lives,” Dasa explains. “And the stars capture all of that.... It actually captures who we are based on our previous life.”

Photo by Rodrigo Torres

Shanto won’t necessarily look at the astrological information when weeding out candidates for his future wife. In fact, he won’t even reference the women he decides to date on Shaadi.com as candidates. To him, like a growing number of people, Shaadi.com is a dating site, something that Shaadi.com is having a hard time realizing. For those who have profiles on the website, Shaadi.com’s customer relations team closely monitors profiles, and will delete profiles that do not clearly state intent to marry because the sole purpose of the website is, in fact, marriage. Despite the fact that Shanto is on the website to date someone, get to know them and then decide whether or not to get married, his profile is still intact.

Need to catch up? Read Part I and Part II.

Sonia Moghe is getting her Master's at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in New York City and works as a television reporter.