Swathi Krishnananda and Pavan Narendra have friends who married through online dating

The two met through mutual family friends, and they’re very happy with how things worked out. But some of their acquaintances are meeting their future spouses through very different means.

“One couple we know met through one of the online matrimonial sites,” Krishnananda said. “They talked, got to know each other, and then they told their families about it and then they said we like each other and we want to get married.”

The website is Shaadi.com, the oldest matrimonial-based dating webpage in the world, with over 20 million users to date. Shaadi.com and other such sources are changing the way young Indian couples are meeting in the US and abroad. Though the majority of Indians are Hindus, and these websites help bring the Hindu single community together, these networks are not exclusively Hindu. And though online dating is a rising global trend, for Indians it’s also changing the culture of traditional matchmaking procedures. 

“Back in the day, arranged marriage was a huge way of getting married. And it was accepted and it was the way to go,” said Jas Banwait, cofounder of up-and-coming Indian dating site TwoMangoes.com.

“But once women started working, and the modernization of the world, even India, people decided that matchmakers was not really what they wanted anymore,” Banwait said.

Unlike more mainstream Western-style dating sites like OkCupid or Match.com, Shaadi.com’s objective is to match people for marriage, and not just for dates. Shaadi means wedding in Hindi, and though hundreds of thousands of people have gotten married through the website, Banwait and her colleagues were dissatisfied with the network’s focus on marriage. 

Based on their personal experiences, the founders thought other young Indian professionals would want to casually date too. They chose the name TwoMangoes, because mango is a popular fruit from India, and they wanted the website to be a fun and easy place for young Indians to pair up into “TwoMangoes.”

“A lot of people in North America might have used Shaadi.com, but there was always a bad connotation with that website,” Banwait says. “People were always making fun of it, and it wasn’t really accepted.”

So Banwait and her team created TwoMangoes.com with the objective of taking the connotation of matrimony out of the dating picture completely.

Now after four years, there are over 100,000 users in North America, and the same for the India webpage.

The India site is not doing as well as the American one, however. When TwoMangoes launched in India, the developers realized that the market was not ready for a dating-only website. The company decided to pull all of its marketing out of India but retain the network on an “underground” level.

“It works better because people don’t want to tell other people that they’re on this dating site, especially their parents,” Banwait says.

There are still many Indian families who like to do things the old-fashioned way of going to a marriage mediator. These brokers hold files of single Indians and know all their biographical information, including height, religion, caste, parents’ information, address and occupation. And though Krishnanada and Narendra think that knowing a person’s background and family history is important in determining compatibility, they don’t give much credence to these mediators.

“They’re not bad, but they’re not totally trustworthy,” Krishnananda says.

“I won’t say they’re bad, I won’t say they’re good,” Narendra adds. “I mean it’s just a business.”

One person whose business has benefitted from dating websites is Neema Lodhia, owner of Wedding Store 24, a wedding concierge service for the South Asian community in southern California. She sees a definite trend in how her customers meet.

“The biggest trend I am seeing is online dating. Most of my couples have met online. OkCupid is the one I hear the most,” Lodhia says.

One of the main reasons young Indians are gravitating towards dating sites like OkCupid and TwoMangoes is to meet partners without parent involvement. Many Shaadi.com users are actually parents posting for their unwed children.

“So if you call up the number, you’re connecting with the dad or mom,” Narendra says. “So they do a preliminary check of ‘hey, who are you and what’s your background.’ Then they pass [the person] on to their children. It’s almost like the norm now.”

Parents of second and third-generation Indians are increasingly open to  Western-style of dating-for-fun-and-not-for-marriage. They understand that times have changed.

“Funny enough, parents are accepting it,” Lodhia says. “For the most part they want their kids to experience what they couldn't. Living in America you don't have a choice but to accept your kids will date to have fun, and not necessarily for marriage.”

But Indian parents still hope their children will find their perfect mate through the process. And they don’t worry as much about caste and religion as they do about occupation and financial status. And even though the culture of South Asian dating and marriage is changing in America and India, the culture of family probably won’t change.

“The parents still have a huge say in what happens with a person’s personal life, with their son or daughter’s personal life,” Banwait says.