Meet the new matchmakers: the pursuit of modern love

By Samhita Arni

Whither goest matrimony, so go the matchmakers. Modern matches increasingly require new ways of connecting. In these days of liberalisation and individual choice, gone are the matchmakers of yore — aunties in saris, clutching portfolios with _haldi-_edged horoscopes. The old go-betweens have been displaced by by online bureaus like shaadi.com and bharatmatrimony, where your soulmate is only a mouse-click away — or so these websites claim.

But in reality, finding someone online can be hard and time-consuming, and requires sifting through thousands of profiles to separate the wheat from the chaff. Despite the sophisticated matchmaking algorithms, we end up in a lot of dead-ends with duds.

Enter the boutique matrimonial agency. The services offered are tailored for a wide range of customers. Some serve the very rich, others cater to specific communities. But for those looking for something new and progressive there’s Marrygold , “boutique matchmakers for the urban Indian.” The Bangalore-based matrimonial bureau advertises itself as the agency of choice for modern singletons looking to move beyond the traditional checklist and usual suspects:

If you believe that marriage is a union of minds, a balance of personalities, and a sharing of goals, joys, sorrows, ideals, interests, burdens, breakfasts. . . . . . . and space, you’ve come to the right place. We make matches based on values and lifestyle rather than community and background.

These days when people’s lives are much more individual, the notion of marriage itself is changing. “Marriage is now more about companionship,” says Nandini Chakraborty, owner of Marrygold. “Ten years ago you married your friends. Nowadays people don’t want to do that.” But neither do they want to be bound by age-old conventions. Community, caste and horoscope are irrelevant to her customers. The first Marrygold wedding happened seven years ago in Australia when a Kashmiri Pandit married a Muslim.

“[My job> is to bring two people together, because it’s so difficult to meet single people in this day and age,” she says. “Finding a partner is as difficult as finding a job or apartment” – or perhaps harder since it requires a lifelong committment. The agency offers pre-marital counseling to help clients determine what sort of marriage they want, and how to achieve it. The subjects range from sex lives to financial planning and infidelity. It also offers post-marital counseling.

Many people come to Marrygold with a long checklist of twenty characteristics that they are looking for in a spouse. Chakraborty advises clients to prioritise and to be open: stick with one or two key factors and be prepared to compromise on the rest.

“Sometimes I have to turn away those clients [only interested in good-looking people> I’m not a modeling agency. I don’t have good-looking people. I just have good people looking to get married.”

That sounds good but but just abandoning the traditional checklist doesn’t necessarily make it easier for urban professionals to find their soulmate. In some ways, a modern “progressive” match may be harder to make. There is no algorithm for marital happiness.

“Nowadays you really have to want to marry,” says Chakraborty. Marriages today are much more equal partnerships and need to maintain a complex balance to work, which varies from couple to couple.

“We get a lot of clients who say that they want to get married,” says Chakraborty. “But in a some cases, after a lot questioning, some realise they are better off single. For these people what we try and do is to get them to meet a partner who is also interested in dating.”

Matchmaking can fail for a whole slew of reasons. Twenty-three year olds might still be fuzzy on what they are looking for. Older clients might be too rigid and fixed in habits. But the biggest sticking point in even the most modern matchmaking situations are gender roles.

The modern woman has a life of her own with a stable job and her own bank balance. She has to figure out where a man even fits in her life since she’s been handling everything on her own until now anyway. “The dynamics between urban couples in terms marriage and relationships have changed a lot,” says Marrygold counselor Gayathri Chakkangal. “Women have evolved faster than men.”

Men get turned off by women who seem to be too independent. They still want women to show some feminine qualities and that doesn’t mean cooking. “One of the difficulties is that some women have forgotten how to be woman – the nurturing, the caring, dressing up, wooing, courting,” says Chakravarty.

Marrygold tries to tell its clients that women don’t need men to ‘protect’ them or provide for them financially. But as its blog on “New Age Relations” explains:

But emotionally, that’s a different story. In that respect women still need their man to ‘protect’ them and take care of them. As for men, they might be slowly shedding their macho self, but women need to make sure that they stoke fire of the male ego once in a while to keep the balance going.

That leads to a conundrum. For all the talk about progressive values and new age relationships is this just the age-old hunter-gatherer stereotypes but with more sensitive packaging? Is the new age man still a caveman, just one who cooks on weekends?

Actually, those cavemen weren’t so bad. According to Helen Fisher, anthropologist at Rutgers University. She says marriage in the 21st century is actually headed back to the way it was 100,000 years ago. And that, she says, might not be a bad thing.

In a TED talk , she explained we are going back to an “ancient form of marriage equality.” Women returning to the job market might feel new to us but for millions of years women in the grasslands of Africa commuted to work daily to gather vegetables, coming home with 60-80 percent of dinner. “The double income family was the standard. And women were regarded as just as economically, socially, and sexually powerful as men,” says Fisher. With the beginning of plough agriculture men became more dominant and women lost their ancient jobs as collectors. Now in the post-industrial age the balance is shifting back again.

“In short we are really moving forward to the past,” says Fisher.

The confusion and angst of Marrygold’s clients — and the quest for modern love — may just be part of this messy journey, as we move full circle toward a future we’ve long left behind.