From Tinder-style matrimonial apps to ancient astrological birth charts, today’s arranged marriages blend technology and tradition in unexpected ways.
On the Indian matrimonial market, I am a tough sell. At 177cm, I’m too tall. At 36, too old. And, born and raised in Australia, my habits are seen as too “Western” for families seeking a traditional Hindu bride.
It is with these misgivings I find myself getting my horoscope analysed at a home in Melbourne’s south-east.
The smell of incense and jasmine infuses the air. Over a cup of tea, astrology enthusiast Dr Vijayaragava Ranganathan — whose day-job is as a chemistry researcher — pulls out his laptop, powering up a program that looks like it was made in the 90s. He enters my details into white spaces: name, birth time (to the minute) and the place I was born, which program converts into longitude and latitude. He hits another button.
Two square boxes fill the screen, a picture of Vinayagar — the elephant god, destroyer of barriers — is imprinted in the middle. Each square is divided into 12 smaller squares that encircle the deity. They represent the positions of the celestial bodies the moment I was born.
This is my birth chart. According to Ranganathan, it determines who I will marry.
In an age when choosing a partner is a decision many young Australians navigate alone, the modern arranged marriage system offers something radically different. It promises relief from the endless swiping on dating apps or scouting at bars, shifting the burden of partner selection to a network of family members, community leaders and astrologers. While prospective brides and grooms have the freedom to refuse a match, the system also provides clear criteria for what should be sought and how to find it.
My parents began searching for my groom about six years ago. They uploaded my profile to matrimonial websites and paid several hundred dollars to a matchmaker who would curate a list of eligible gentlemen living in Australia and abroad.
Since then I have met around five potential matches and my parents have interacted with the parents of many more would-be grooms. Not to spoil the ending, but these efforts have, so far, been unsuccessful.
The experience points towards a dilemma that I’m sure must confront other families in our situation, caught between two systems of finding love.
Parents, many of whom entered traditional arranged marriages themselves, are now asked to loosen a matchmaking role once considered theirs alone. Children like me — brought up in Australia — are left negotiating where their romantic autonomy ends and inherited obligation begins. Say no too often, you are accused of betraying your traditions or being “too picky”. Say yes too quickly, you risk settling for a marriage built to appease familial and social pressures.
How do you choose, when the cost of choosing wrongly feels so high?
The process typically goes like this: your parents find an eligible prospect, either online or through the wider community. Each party exchanges profiles of the children, including ethnic background, height, skin colour, diet, occupation and salary, educational level, star sign, caste or sect, and residency status. Photos might accompany the profile, but not always.
If both families support the match, things move forward.
An astrologer, someone like Ranganathan, might be consulted to ensure star signs align.
Then, you and the prospect are encouraged to meet — over phone or computer, sometimes in person (a luxury afforded to prospects living in the same country). Early meetings may take place in the presence of other family members.
If everyone decides the couple is a good match, marriage arrangements can be made.
And if things don’t work out? The entire process repeats, ad infinitum.
In India, as many as 90 per cent of couples meet via the arranged marriage system. With more than one million people of South Asian background living in Australia it’s estimated a majority of Indian-Australians also marry through family-assisted means.
Biodata lists — which detail the credentials of prospective brides and grooms and were traditionally shared directly with families — circulate over WhatsApp and Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members around the world. Millions of dollars are poured into subscription-based matrimonial websites to connect the parents of young adults where village networks once reigned.
Yet in diaspora communities, that system is being forced — often uneasily — to adapt as migration and generational change have strained traditional processes.
To this day, the search for my groom continues. Relatives consult astrologers to diagnose the cosmic barriers to my wedding day. Acquaintances of my parents propose eligible young men for consideration upon hearing I am still unmarried. Others recommend rituals for my parents to perform, designed to win the favour of the planetary gods and deliver them a son-in-law.
I am an uneasy participant in the arranged marriage process. I am sceptical of astrology, and of the narrow traits through which some families assess potential partners.
Deciding on my groom based on caste or skin colour sounds downright repulsive. I remain doubtful that a shared cultural, religious or ethnic background equates to a healthy relationship.
Yet I understand the appeal of a family-coordinated marriage. It offers a way to fulfil cultural expectations, to ease my parents’ anxiety, to render the process of finding a spouse deliberate and predictable. This approach feels particularly valuable when the alternative seems to simply hope an encounter might bloom into enduring love.
All it requires is compliance. Follow the process. Meet the suitors. Make a choice.
Seen this way, could arranged or assisted marriages provide some sort of guidebook to the notoriously unstructured matters of the heart?
Sitting beside Ranganathan, the answer seems to be a resounding “yes”. For him, marriage and compatibility are, quite literally, written in the stars — and individuals have little control over the outcome.
Within many South Asian households, astrology remains a widely trusted guide. In India, 44 per cent of people believe in astrology, according to a Pew research study.
“You should not work against these things,” Ranganathan advises when sharing the results of my birth chart. “Love at first sight, that’s not going to last long, right?”
Within many Hindu families, using astrology to arrange marriages is defended as a tradition or science. But its real utility is its function, offering parents a socially acceptable way to refuse a match, simply by saying “the horoscopes don’t align”, whether or not that’s the truth. It also provides “a pathway”, as Ranganathan puts it, that assures parents and children they have made the right choice.
“It takes the pressure off,” Ranganathan says. “Don’t be carried away by the results. If it is negative, don’t worry because it is already [written].”
Does such a process truly lead to marital bliss?
To find out, I dive into the experiences of other families in Australia negotiating this modern arranged marriage scene
But there was an impediment to me reaching them.
Discussing your triumphs and failures in finding a suitable match for your child is “like airing your dirty laundry,” one father puts it to me. Sharing those experiences with Australia’s national broadcaster is, for many families, simply out of the question. Young men I had been set up with politely declined an interview for this story. My requests to Indian-Australian community groups went unanswered.
In desperation, I created a survey and circulated it on some popular Indian-Australian matrimonial Facebook and WhatsApp groups, inviting parents and their children to anonymously share their stories. By the end of the month, almost 50 people had responded.
When I call Survey Responder 29, he is scanning matrimonial websites for matches for his daughter.
“There are some suitable boys that I have picked, and I have sent interest to them,” the retired Sydneysider explains. “If they don’t come back, I keep doing it for her, life goes on.”
Like many parents and children I spoke to for this story, this respondent wanted to remain anonymous, worried that sharing his views might jeopardise his daughter’s chances on the matrimonial market. They have been searching for her groom for more than a decade.
When they began, the father wanted “all the 10 boxes ticked”. The boy had to be from the same ethnic and religious group. From the same caste. From a good family. He had to be a strict vegetarian. Their horoscopes had to align. Every condition mattered.
Finding such a person proved difficult. The father recounts visiting one prospect in Melbourne, only to discover the man had a secret girlfriend living in his house. Another suitor started hounding his daughter for money once their contact details were exchanged.
Arranged marriages have always been a communal affair. Traditionally, they were between children barely in their teens, and it was parents, grandparents, older siblings, aunts and uncles too who were involved in visiting prospects’ families and assessing if everyone got along.
While child marriage is now illegal, the bones of the system remain intact. Marriage is a decision made collectively. In traditional households, romantic dating is discouraged. The prospective bride and groom may meet a handful of times, at most, before a wedding date is set. After marriage, the bride can be expected to relocate to her husband’s family home, where multiple generations may live under the same roof.
But in Australia, this approach faces roadblocks. Many single adults from India have migrated alone. Parents make decisions without a clear picture of their child’s values in a foreign country.
Another complication is intent. The matrimonial pool is often global, with children of migrants — like myself — considering matches from India, the US, UK, Canada, and elsewhere. It can be difficult to disentangle the desire for marriage from the desire for migration. In online matrimonial forums, I encountered men openly seeking so-called “contract marriages”, asking to wed Australian-Indian citizens as a pathway to settle in Australia.
As a result, this father eventually filtered out prospects based on migration status, limiting the pool of eligible bachelors and forcing compromises. After two years of searching, he forwent some of his criteria. After four more years, more were struck off. Today, all he wants is to find someone his daughter likes.
The father’s voice carries both frustration and remorse.
“Most children are delayed in marriage due to parents not being educated, like in my case,” he tells me, chastising himself for not compromising earlier.
This father’s sense of guilt stays with me after I put down the phone. The parents of children still single in their 30s often receive the bulk of reproach from relatives and community members accusing them of not prioritising their child’s future.
It is hard to explain this to friends who see marriage as a purely individual choice. In families like mine, the search for a partner is always a collective project. When you are the object of all that effort, your marriage becomes a kind of release from intergenerational anxiety, from hours trawling profiles, from second-guessing and self-blame.
Deciding to find love independently, or not at all, can seem ungrateful. It means rejecting the labour, time and care embedded in the process, and living with the knowledge that your unmarried life is interpreted, however unfairly, as evidence of your parents’ failures.
I feel an ache listening to this father blame himself for his daughter’s circumstance. I want to lift this guilt off him, off my own parents — even while knowing they wouldn’t want me to settle for a marriage purely to make them happy.
The words “arranged marriage” are a blunt term for what is today a more negotiated process. Many parents who responded to my survey described something closer to an “assisted” marriage, saying the final decision of whom to marry rested with their child.
In practice, though, implicit cultural pressure can still force the child’s hand. A prospect who speaks the same mother tongue, for example, is often seen as more desirable particularly if the couple is expected to care for the parents in old age, as is common in many South Asian households. Prospects seeking a same-sex spouse can struggle to signal their desire, since most matrimonial platforms are designed to introduce boys to girls. Within these traditional processes, heterosexuality is often assumed.
From the survey, I gained an intimate insight into the criteria many parents use to find their children’s spouses. The majority had been searching for more than two years. The biggest deciding factors were the family background (86 per cent) and education (86 per cent) of prospective matches. In Australia, this often meant a preference for university degrees. Prospects’ personality and values (83 per cent), religion (69 per cent) and financial stability (61per cent) were also important.
One highly educated woman in her 20s from Sydney tells me, “my parents act as my dating app”. She feels free to use other dating platforms like Hinge and Bumble, and is confident in meeting men independently and assessing their qualities herself.
Nevertheless, the experience is “very hard”. As an Australian citizen, she wants to stay here, yet many men request she relocate to India or elsewhere. Colourism is another battle she’s faced, with prospective grooms and their families insisting on lighter-skinned brides.
“They treat me like a checklist, and I end up getting objectified during these interactions,” she tells me.
The problem, she says, isn’t the fact that parents are involved. Rather, the men she’s encountered — both through her parents and on dating apps — “are not respectful of women”.
She tells me about a few occasions when, on a first date, the men would measure her features against a “pros and cons” list, telling her across from the table where she ranked.
“Honestly, it’s just been horrible,” she says.
While arranged marriage has evolved to allow greater choice, particularly in countries like Australia, love-based dating has seemingly moved in the opposite direction. Dating apps have replaced chance encounters for many young couples in Australia.
Profiles, filters, and subscriptions have turned romance into a process of structured comparison, much like India’s traditional matrimonial process. Both invite a constant audit of desire — what’s non-negotiable, what you can settle for, what you cannot. As this young woman found, where arranged marriages join strangers through family mediation, apps now seem to do the same through algorithms.
One in five parents who responded to the survey said the hardest part of the matrimonial process was that women were unwilling to relocate for their husbands.
“As age goes up, girls become independent and refuse to relocate or come out of present comforts,” shared one responder, looking for a wife for their 35-year-old son.
A Melbourne-based academic and mother of three, who asked for anonymity, is looking for a groom for her 24-year-old daughter. Unusually, it was the daughter who enlisted her parent’s help in the process.
“People who come from India with all those traditions think the kids need to follow it,” the mother says. “But, especially if they’re born and brought up here, it’s too much for them.”
I meet the family at their home in Melbourne’s inner suburbs. Every corner of their house tells the story of their eclectic lives abroad.
The mum migrated to Australia in 1990 on a PhD scholarship. She married soon after.
“I was so lucky,” she tells me. “[My family] never put any pressure on.”
That experience shapes how she approaches marriage for her own children. She wants them to decide who they will spend their lives with. The family shares the password of an online matrimonial profile made for their daughter, and the parents have joint video calls with prospective grooms alongside their daughter.
“It streamlines everything,” the daughter explains when I ask why she sought her parent’s help to look for a husband. “If you want someone from the same background, same cultural values, it’s a good platform.”
Nevertheless, her experience has been disheartening. Some parents approach the process like they’re marketing managers for their sons.
“You realise that the parents are never going to say anything bad about their own kids,” the daughter says. “They’re not going to say, ‘Oh, my son doesn’t know how to cook, doesn’t know how to clean’.”
After a few ghostings and dead ends, a decision has been made to take down the young woman’s profile.
“There’s no proper media or a club or something like that where our community people can go freely,” the mother says. “But I think not all parents are thinking along those lines.”
The practice of arranging marriages is not exclusive to Indian families. Forms of family-assisted matchmaking exist across cultures — including within Muslim, Jewish, East Asian and parts of African diasporas. Often, what varies is the degree of choice afforded to those at the centre of it.
On Indian matrimonial platforms, you are more likely to find men putting up their own profiles, while a woman’s details are usually shared by parents or close family members.
“Looking for [a] bride is very hard, there’s [an] imbalance of demand and supply,” said a 26-year-old man from Geelong, adding that there were “too few women” — particularly from the North Indian community in Australia — looking for a husband. Meanwhile, many of his prospects from India had barely graduated school. “The only motive I see is they want to migrate to Australia,” he said.
Other men lamented that matrimonial sites like shaadi.com were like “parents-approved Tinder”. One respondent said that, in Australia, “it’s musical chair between dating apps and matrimonial apps”.
Another respondent said he chose to migrate to the United States in the hopes of expanding his pool of eligible partners. He said the Indian women he met in Australia were not “top of the breed talent”.
“People who are educated are much more driven for excellence in their careers, and they don’t find interest in visiting Australia,” he said. “The pool of people coming in are substantially mid-level, even I consider myself as a mid-level”
Others have a more reflective take on the process.
My mum introduced me to Arjun (not his real name) about five years ago, after speaking to his parents. We chatted briefly over WhatsApp but never met in person.
Arjun doesn’t remember me — I don’t take it personally, he has interacted with lots of women over the years. He is still unmarried, but no longer actively searching.
He sees the difficulty in making arranged marriages work as a symptom of generational shifts. His parents, raised with the idea of “get married, make it work”, do not understand that this attitude does not fit today.
Arjun recalls one phone call with his frustrated father in India.
“He was just like, ‘Just say yes and make it work’,” Arjun tells me. “I’m like, ‘Bro, that worked in your generation, it’s not going to work in mine’.”
Love is not an element that the arranged marriage system easily trades in. It may grow between two strangers once they marry, but it is neither inevitable nor a prerequisite. Spouses don’t fall in or out of love, but “make it work”, as Arjun’s father advised. Falling in love is a whimsical addition in a system that sees marriage as a rational agreement.
Instead of love, families talk about “compatibility”. In Tamil, we use the word poruttam — meaning both an astrological harmony and the sense that two people are appropriate for one another.
This approach works for many Australian couples. They described the process as, at times, awkward and invasive — parents uploading profiles without consultation, video calls with entire families, the interference of well-meaning relatives in personal affairs. Yet many have gone on to build stable lives with partners deemed culturally, and supposedly astrologically, compatible.
As for me, after some recalibration, Ranganathan settles on a prediction. I will be married between 2027 and 2028.
He offers to look through his database of eligible men and find my astrological match. I decline.
Nevertheless, I agree to meet a man suggested by a family friend as a suitable match.
He is from the same ethnic background and lives in Australia. He is apparently tall, like me. Beyond that, I am unsure what to expect, having spoken to him only once on the phone. I do know that he wants his future wife to relocate for him.
I am determined to keep an open mind, aware of the hope my parents have pinned on this meeting. But I’m also pessimistic — for me and many in my situation, we’re not just looking for a partner. We’re also looking for a system that ensures we choose well.
I have, at times, dipped a toe into the world of online dating or indulged in a fanciful daydream about a stranger on a train. Although none of this has amounted to anything, I still wonder if I might find someone organically, without all the choreography of traditional matchmaking.
Sometimes I think my Australian upbringing has shaped me so thoroughly that I am searching for some naïve, Western concept of romantic “love”, one that the arranged marriage system was never designed to accommodate. Or perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps my family’s influence is so strong that I remain wary of love itself, reluctant to welcome it fully, and instead find myself chasing “compatibility” and a version of marriage that feels rational and acceptable to others.
A father I interview suggests my generation, the children of migrants, are suspended in thirisangu sorgam, a concept from a Tamil folktale about a king refused entry into paradise by the gods. The king attempts to bypass fate by building a heaven between earth and the celestial realm. Stranded in this thirisangu sorgam, this in-between place, he is denied the rewards of either world, condemned to a state of permanent dissatisfaction.
I think often about that in-between world. About what it means to hover between love and arrangement, between choice and obligation — while never fully surrendering to either.
Nevertheless, I book a flight to Queensland where I will meet the man suggested by my family. Perhaps finding a suitable partner is really that simple after all.
Words: Prianka Srinivasan
Editor: Catherine Taylor
Illustrations: Lindsay Dunbar