America is in a dating crisis.
Online dating is a multi-billion dollar industry, but young people are growing pessimistic about it. A 2024 study commissioned by the dating app Tinder found that 91 percent of male respondents and 94 percent of female respondents believed the current dating environment is more difficult than ever.
For the South Asian diaspora, whose countries of origin have prominent cultures of arranged marriages, this crisis of romance can be difficult to comprehend for parents and grandparents invested in their children’s marriage prospects.
Immigrants to the United States, often in arranged marriages of their own, have a very different context for what facilitates successful relationships—namely, prioritizing stability and material success—than their children born and raised in the U.S., who may be more inclined to prioritize romance.
Bridging these two divides has resulted in unique arrangements for finding love.
South Asians have long embraced digital tools for matchmaking and romance, often across borders. Shaadi.com, a popular online matchmaking service, was founded in 1996 and has since proclaimed itself to be the “world’s largest matchmaking service,” with users in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere.
As a child in the early 2000s, I regularly saw commercials for Bharat Matrimony, a competing matchmaking service, on the TV channels my parents watched Bollywood movies on.
Now WhatsApp, already a popular messaging service among the diaspora to communicate with far-away family members, is the newest iteration of this openness to digital romance. WhatsApp groups of all kinds have formed for community members to facilitate successful marriages for their children. Some are specific to certain caste backgrounds, religions, languages, or regions of South Asia, while others are more diverse in nature.
These WhatsApp groups have long been popular in South Asia, where marriage is commonly facilitated by family members (they are so popular in Bangladesh that they are often called “Halal Hinge”). But in North America, these groups offer a more traditional option for recent immigrants and for second-generation South Asians caught between the more traditional approach back home and Western approaches to marriage and love.
Sushmita, a writer on the West Coast who asked to use a pseudonym for privacy, told me she had reluctantly agreed to let her parents look for matches on a WhatsApp group despite not wanting to “be on there” and a preference for finding a partner on her own.
“You grow up thinking that you’re going to meet someone organically, and you have this idea of love,” she said. “And then suddenly you’re looking at someone’s bio in a WhatsApp group.”
She had a few conversations with various people. But ultimately, she opted not to meet any of them in person, deciding she was still more inclined to find a partner on her own.
“I think sometimes I stand too strong on my ideals and my principles, and I sometimes miss out on certain experiences because of that.” Sushmita said. “It was just a process of elimination … I already know what it’s going to be like, but let me just prove to myself that it’s going to be what I think [the WhatsApp group] is.”
Still swiping
These WhatsApp groups are often self-selecting—exclusive to specific religions, languages, or regions of South Asia. Some groups are geographically-specific to a certain part of the U.S., and others have members all over the country.
The groups are typically advertised on Instagram and Facebook, and users who want to join often need to be approved by the chat’s moderators. They are mostly populated by discerning parents looking for their child’s future spouse, although some people looking to get married choose to advertise themselves directly. Members post photos and information about their child or themselves, often called “biodata,” including city of residence, physical characteristics, profession, salary, and lifestyle.
Aditi, a tech worker in New York who requested to use a pseudonym for privacy, is not personally a part of these groups, but her parents are. She told me her parents will occasionally forward prospective matches to her. She’s met some of them over FaceTime, but mostly to no avail.
“Some of them are pretty serious, but some of them, their parents set them up and they didn’t know [beforehand], so they’re just there to have a conversation,” Aditi said.
Despite taking a straightforward approach to matchmaking on the basis of one’s biodata, these groups replicate the dynamics of conventional dating apps, making it incredibly easy for family members to “swipe” through prospective matches.
In writing about her own experiences with matchmaking WhatsApp groups for WIRED, Faima Bakar found her mother had dealt with breadcrumbing, ghosting, and lying—common modern dating woes—while trying to find her prospective partners.
“She has even experienced the most soul-crushing dating peril of all,” Baker wrote, “getting invested in people who aren’t even single.”
People facilitate arranged marriages via WhatsApp outside of these groups, too. Geeta Minocha, a model based in the Bay Area, told me her mother set her up without her knowledge with people she discovered through Shaadi.com, and then vetted them through networks of friends and family on WhatsApp.
“I didn’t know I had a profile … and I told her to take it down,” she said. “And apparently she did. I’m hoping she did.”
“I think my mom’s dream is me just marrying another Indian guy,” Minocha added. “I think she would want me to be with, basically, just a white-collar professional, where that kind of success is easy to assess, and I am maybe a little more comfortable with risk.”
‘Someone that’s equally on my level or higher’
In traditional arranged marriages, matches are determined in large part by socioeconomic status, and people would typically marry within their social class. Indian Americans are the wealthiest demographic in the United States, many of whom are in professions like tech, medicine, and engineering. Many opt to self-select for status in dating.
In promoting a specific ideal of heterosexual matrimony, these WhatsApp networks can be more exclusive than inclusive. Aditi noted that the groups she was familiar with were mostly made up of high-income professionals, and was comfortable with that level of self-selection.
“I’m in tech, and I majored in [computer science] … so I’m looking for someone that’s equally on my level or higher,” she said.
While the preferences of these high-income professionals are not reflective of the true diversity of the diaspora, groups within the South Asian community that do not fit this profile—queer Desis, caste-oppressed Desis, working class Desis—have also used WhatsApp to find community and romance.
Sneha Jayaraj, a civil rights lawyer in New York, started the WhatsApp group Tristate Queer Desis in 2022 while still a student at CUNY Law School. She wanted to foster community among queer South Asians who did not necessarily have a safe space to openly live their identities. The group, originally called Queering and Desi-ing in New York City, now has nearly 1,000 members, spanning the breadth and depth of South Asia, and encompassing many different gender identities and sexualities.
“Throughout South Asian history, there has been a lot of queerness,” Jayaraj said. “But we don’t learn about all that here in America, and I’m not sure if they learn that in South Asia too post-colonization.”
The group functions as a safe space for members to live openly as queer Desis, and to find community with each other that they may not have experienced elsewhere.
“I kept meeting so many South Asians who didn’t feel safe because they felt like they were the only ones,” Jayaraj said. “I think a lot of people just get happy seeing that there’s so many South Asians who are queer.”
(Read more: “Queer South Asians Get Their Own Big Fat Desi Wedding”)
The group’s diversity is a strength, but class privilege still influences how members relate to one another. Multiple members said there is an internal ban on discussing politics of any kind, albeit the rule isn’t strictly enforced.
“I personally think it goes back to the economics … the rich South Asian queers, they want to halt politics as much as possible,” Jayaraj said. “I think socioeconomic status plays a big deal in these spaces, and it’s a microcosm, really, of the real world.”
Cross-country dating
Radha Patel, founder of the matchmaking service Single2Shaadi, works with South Asians in the U.S. that span the diversity of the subcontinent, across ages, countries of origin, religions and languages spoken. Her clients live all over the U.S., and Patel noted that many of them were open to meeting someone outside of their geographic area.
“As South Asians, I think we’re much more open to long distance relationships,” Patel said. “Our parents have traversed continents in order to … be with their people. So they’re always kind of open to it.”
Single2Shaadi has a free WhatsApp chat open to the public, which generates a sense of community and helps generate leads for her business. Patel is based in Texas, but her most popular regions are the coasts, specifically the Bay Area and New York City. The chat has subgroups for men, women, specific areas of the U.S., queer clients, and older singles.
Unlike many matchmaking services geared toward South Asians, Patel’s business works directly with people trying to find a partner, rather than using family members as intermediaries.
“They do sneak in sometimes,” she said. “We really work with the individuals specifically, because this is a lifelong decision that they need to be on board with.”
I was not allowed to join the men’s chat, so I can’t confirm what they are discussing there. But the “Gals Chat” is quite active—with women all over the U.S. sharing stories of their own dating experiences, seeking support and reassurance from each other.
Their problems seemed virtually indistinguishable from any other avenue for dating. Members messaged about emotional availability, communication, and compatibility. But, more importantly, I noticed that regardless of whether these women found life partners through the experience, they had found platonic connection through the WhatsApp chat—and sometimes even real-life friends.
“If they’re in a certain area,” Patel said, “they’ll get together for coffee once in a while.”
The post Swiping Right on WhatsApp: How Some South Asian Americans Are Looking for Love appeared first on Rewire News Group.
