Love and Money in an Indian Marriage

Sept. 28, 2006 — -- Imagine if the person you were going to spend the rest of your life with was chosen by a group of your closest friends and family.

The person you have children with and share a bed selected by your parents, siblings and crazy aunt.

That's the prospect still facing young people in India.

For millions of Indians, however, there's a new way to get around the old matchmaking system, a new way to find love.

It's on the Internet.

Online matrimony sites are booming in India.

But Indians go online looking for relationships, which is not always the case in the United States.

The Top 2 Indian matrimony sites, Bharatmatrimony.com and Shaadi.com, boast 12.5 million paying members combined compared to the leading U.S. site Match.com, which has a user base of 15 million.

Registered users dish out a minimum of $30 for a three-month membership, a substantial sum for many Indians in rural areas.

For a country with a billion people, the business of love could also mean big money.

Yahoo! believes there's so much potential that its first investment in the Indian subcontinent was Bharatmatrimony.

Yahoo! along with Canaan Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund, invested $8 million to enable Indians to find love online.

Despite of the many advancements ushered into India via technology and Western influences, what has not changed is the importance of parental and even family approval of marriages.

Today "assisted marriage" has replaced the controversial tradition of arranged marriage in about 80 percent of India and Indian communities abroad.

Assisted marriages are those facilitated by family members, friends, classified advertisements or local matchmakers in a well-orchestrated and time-tested process.