Athena Sobhan, 28, has spent the better part of a decade swiping on South Asian-focused dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, OkCupid, Coffee Meets Bagel, and even Dil Mil. However, after more than five years, she feels her symptoms have significantly worsened and is ready to choose a different approach.
“The app is terrible and it’s not fun,” said Sobhan, a Bangladeshi American who lives in Southern California. “I got to the point where I didn’t want to play the game.”
So she deleted them all and asked her mother a question she never thought to ask. “Could you please find someone for me?”
As dating apps continue to be a disappointment for young people looking for love, some South Asian Americans are turning to an alternative once considered a relic of their parents’ generation: matchmaking. I’m looking for marriage.
modern arranged marriage
In recent years, western-driven media outlets such as Netflix’s “Indian Matchmaking” have increased exotic interest in arranged marriages and Indian weddings. But Harleen Singh, associate professor of women’s studies and South Asian literature at Brandeis University, says modern arranged marriages don’t necessarily look the same as what the media has shown us.
Processes range from ultra-traditional to simple implementation.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean marriage is decided or forced,” she says. “This lens of what arranged marriages look like in South Asia is often also a lens that comes from outside.”
In some religious or Orthodox communities, families make decisions and sit together once or twice before the couple meets at the proverbial altar. But that is usually not the case, especially in the American diaspora.
Many who choose it say that following an initial introduction, they need to date and get to know each other for a few months before any decisions are made. They just want to know they’re meeting people who are serious about marriage, and they trust their parents more than an app’s algorithm.
“The success of a dating app is determined by the programming that goes into it,” Singh said. “Whereas when a family is involved, you’re really thinking about not just two individuals, but the much larger community partnership that comes together through them.”
Radha Patel, founder of the dating service Single to Shaadi, with her team members, head ambassador Utkarsh Shrivastava (left), and former dating coach Chirag Shah. Single to Shaadi
Joytsana Sangrola, 24, a Nepali-American living in New York, also recently deleted all dating apps. She said she’s had good and bad experiences with them, but ultimately thinks they’re more organic and less serious than the connections that can be formed through community.
She is dating to get married, but says she is having trouble finding a connection with a Nepali man and wants it more and more.
“My mother says, ‘You should be with a Nepali boy,'” she says. “Yeah, find me. …It’s nice to settle down with someone who speaks the same language as me and has the same culture as me, even if it’s not 100%.”
Joytsana Sangrula.Joytsana Sangrula
If her parents introduce her to someone, she says it’s more like a friend setting her up on a blind date, and it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s fully committed to marriage.
Sana, 24, of Dallas, who asked to only use her first name for fear of retaliation, hopes to be married by age 30. In the past, she had met men through Instagram, but she was tired of dating and ended up in the same situation. Like others. Emphasizing cultural harmony and a similar “halal to haram” ratio, she said she would like to be introduced to someone by her family and date them for a year before getting engaged.
“I’ve seen people go into arranged marriages and live their best lives,” she says. “I love it for them. So if it worked for them, it can definitely work for me.”
authentic indian matchmaking
With ‘Indian Matchmaking’ and its immense popularity, Western audiences have become familiar with the term biodata, a resume-like document presented to a potential suitor that includes a person’s photo and details.
The incident also gave people a glimpse of the superficial and demeaning standards often demanded of women looking for husbands. For example, hopeful mothers-in-law wanted their daughters-in-law to be of a certain height, weight, caste, or skin color.
Some matchmakers here are trying to combat that perception.
Radha Patel, 40, is a Dallas-based matchmaker and founder of the marriage counseling service Single to Shaadi. Her services are not filtered by caste, skin color or astrological chart. She also accepts people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.
“We really want to get rid of all the old notions that parents think matchmaking is in our culture and throw them out the window,” she said.
She tries to balance modernity and tradition – biodata and happy moments. She officially launched the service in 2018 after seeing her peers complaining about dating apps. Cultural pressure to find a mate is colliding with the endless flood of bad options in modern dating, she said.
Singles to Shadi’s Speed Dating Event in September. Single to Shaadi
“It’s a paradox of choice, ‘just swipe’ or ‘just ghost’,” she says.
She made it clear that she is not a headhunter who can find the perfect person. Matching people is easy, she said, but the rest is up to them.
“You get introduced to the matches every day. The question is what you do after that,” she said.
She says the biggest drawback of dating apps is that they don’t allow people to meet in person. She sees a yearning for it among some South Asians who want to be immersed in culture without endless swiping.
Fighting dating apps
Dating app powerhouses Bumble and Match Group (which owns Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Hinge and more) have lost $40 billion in market value over the past three years, according to the New York Times. That’s what it means. Young people like Thorbahn now realize that everything is behind a paywall. Key features are no longer available unless you enter your card number, and people are becoming less willing to pay for those features.
“It’s well known that if you don’t pay for your services, you’re going to get the worst nominations,” she says. “Before, you could enter your preferences, but now you can just enter your basic preferences: do you want a man or a woman, do you want something casual? Everything else is behind a paywall. It is located in
Athena Thorburn. Provided by: Athena Sobhan
The new lawsuit also claims that apps like Tinder and Hinge are designed to be addictive and encourage compulsive use. A Match Group representative called the lawsuit “absurd and without merit.”
“Our business model is not based on advertising or engagement metrics,” they said. “Every day, we actively strive to get people to go on dates without using an app. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t understand the purpose and mission of our industry as a whole. ”
Racism and sexism are also prevalent, users and experts say. They say queer people of color especially encounter “sexual racism” on apps like Grindr, and that Asian women are fetishized across platforms.
“Just because a space is democratized or you’re in that space doesn’t mean we’re all equally in that space,” Singh says.
Prejudice against arranged marriages
When Sangrula was a child, she imagined arranged marriages as something that had fallen out of fashion with her parents’ generation, an ancient ritual in which two people were simply “assigned to each other” without any input. It is said that he was She now knows it’s not supposed to be that way.
“I’m still skeptical about the concept of arranged marriages,” she says. “But as the generations go on, more and more parents say, ‘This person is single.’ You have to talk to them and see what happens after that.”
Neither demonization nor fetishization is helpful or justice to the complex South Asian community, she said, as TV shows use conspiracies.
“Before dating apps, people met each other through other people, whether family members introduced each other or friends introduced each other,” Sangrula said. “The reason it’s called ‘matchmaking’ is because there are assumptions about how South Asians approach this business of love and marriage.”
