It was easy for Adam and Eve. Finding a partner for marriage is quite a difficult proposition nowadays. Typically, this process happens only once in a lifetime, so no one has experience dealing with the nuances of going through the process of finding a marriage partner. Parents and the elderly help.

The Professional Matchmaker

The matchmaker used to be the only point of contact when it came to finding a match, being a database of eligible talking, walking girls and boys. They will come uninvited to your house while checking on all possible boys and girls coming of age. They hold a position of trust as they need to maintain their custom if they want to survive in their profession. Any information that passes between the two parties of a marriage goes through the matchmaker and the matchmaker will also examine the details. There is a downside to this arrangement. The matchmaker benefits only if an alliance is made. There is pressure on the matchmaker to see that the parties agree with each other and he uses her influence to see that the alliance takes place. Every community has its professional matchmaker. This gives the matchmaker the option to focus on a particular community.

The Classified Section in Newspapers and Marriage Centers

Over the years, with the advancement of science and technology, the people of a community no longer stayed in one place, but began to disperse. This made it difficult for the professional matchmaker to cater to the extended community. Their only way of keeping in touch with families in the great country was through families back home. People soon felt this inconvenience about the professional matchmaker. To make up for the gap in geographic coverage, people soon began using national newspapers to place ads in the classified sections of newspapers looking for boyfriends and girlfriends. This way of looking for a partnership relied on the premise that all families looking for a match would be seriously looking at the classifieds and contacting advertisers. What followed was a telephone conversation and a visit to each other’s homes by the elders of the bride or groom-to-be. It may culminate in a meeting of the bride and groom before the marriage takes place to verify personal tastes and inclinations. A set of marriage centers also sprung up that would maintain a database of potential brides or grooms and provide parties looking for a match with a set of names and addresses of other potential candidates for them to contact and negotiate with. The newspaper ad and marriage centers have one thing in common, and that is that they benefit from just providing the information and do not benefit from a partnership, which leads people to have faith in these two service providers.

marriage websites

With the advent of the Internet, he soon realized that the database of eligible brides and grooms could easily be opened up to match seekers. Sagai.com was one of the first matrimonial websites to make its debut in India in 1996, which later became known as shaadi.com. bharatmatrimony.com was the next matrimonial site which started its operations in 1997. Indians started to take advantage of technology and as matrimonial websites evolved we had more players in this game. Nowadays, matrimonial websites not only provide the marriage database to the match seekers but also provide other facilities like validation of persons, functionalities to chat online between two interested parties and communicate via email. and phone, as well as providing the basic functionality of dating based on many parameters and attributes that update all registered parties. The lucrative model of the service is based entirely on charging fees to registered users through the provision of value-added services such as assisted marriage, the possibility of chatting and contacting by phone or email, etc. The websites present a community-based front-end for users that meets the cultural requirements of users as practiced by professional matchmakers. The only drawback of these websites is that the information about registered users is not fully vetted through the websites that provide validation services.