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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!, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund, invested $8 million to enable Indians to find love online.
Indian Marriage Guided, Not Forced Into Modern Times
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.
Criteria such as religion, languages spoken, education, dietary habits, social status, astrological sign, skin fairness, caste, and even green-card status are factors used in evaluating prospects.
Online matrimony sites are making it easier to search for people using the same criteria and techniques used with traditional Indian methods.
For Manjari Kulkarni, a first-generation American from Pittsburgh, Indian-American relationship sites such as Indiandating.com, Desimatch.com and MeraPyar.com were the first place she turned once she was ready to start looking seriously for a mate.
Being able to search by criteria that mattered to her and to her family was a big appeal of these sites.
Though she was brought up in the United States by Indian-born parents, the 33-year-old orthodontist still felt pressure from friends and family to get married.
"You can be CEO of the biggest company, but that 'Are you married?' question is ultimately going to get asked and is what matters to them."
After one year of online searching, she found and married her current husband, who also is from Pittsburgh and whose parents are friends with her family.
"My marriage was kind of arranged through the Internet. The Web helped us realize that the other existed when we otherwise may have not known."
United States Sees Big Opportunity in Indian Matrimony
Because of this dynamic, many brides and grooms still don't get enough input in choosing their partner with marriages often forced because the mate's qualifications are right.
If the local matchmaker retires, local marriage rates slacken. Classified advertisements are costly and can be misleading especially without pictures.
Business people call this a fragmented and inefficient market that creates unhappy customers.
Deepak Kamra, general partner at Canaan Partners, says that this market in India will "eventually be a bigger market than the U.S."
Surprisingly to many Americans, he said that "India is not ready for dating, and our view is that whatever happened 10 years ago in the U.S. with online dating will happen here but with some changes for the Indian market."
If Yahoo! and venture capitalists like Kamra are right, the Web could be just what India needs to create a booming and technologically savvy enterprise around the business of love.
The cultural changes could be even more dramatic.
Young people, with the help of the Web, could increasingly gain control of a process that has never been entirely theirs.
Parents will likely continue to play a role in approving matches, though in a more passive fashion.
About a quarter of the members on Bharatmatrimony.com are friends, relatives and parents of marriage-seekers who join simply to facilitate introductions.
Marriage is a $10 billion-a-year industry in India.
Getting a slice of that is the real opportunity for Internet entrepreneurs.
Recently, both Shaadi.com and Bharatmatrimony.com launched dozens of matrimony centers across India where Internet novices or those without computer access could come for computer help and access to a potential mate.
For many users, this experience is their first foray on the Web.
Hema, a 35-year-old Indian-born American and online dater, said: "In the end, all my parents want is for me to be happy. If you can find a mate that you can commit to and that person is honest, then what does is matter that you found them on the Internet or not?"
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