The man was “coincidentally” near her hotel. That’s what he said, anyway. Ripal Dixit, 36, had mentioned a girls’ trip to Jaipur in passing during one of her early conversations with a potential match she’d found on a matrimonial app. What followed was a cascade of calls. Where was she staying? What were her plans? “I am near your hotel; let’s meet.”
Her group of friends, wandering through the Pink City, began to feel as if they were being “softly stalked.” “It was absurd in hindsight,” says Ripal, “but also revealing. Matrimonial apps often advertise seriousness and intention, but many interactions feel less like conversations about partnership and more like badly disguised with parental approval attached to it.”
The arranged marriage system was once a quiet, family-orchestrated affair. Cups of chai, a few pleasantries, a boy and a girl awkwardly seated across each other while their parents negotiated futures, but now, it has transformed into something far more complicated. Today, it involves sites and apps with thousands of profiles, back-to-back weekend meetings, elaborate family negotiations, and a psychological toll that nobody quite warns you about.
Sakshi Bahl, 36, knows this exhaustion intimately. A media professional whose career runs on long hours and unpredictable schedules, she watched her weekends disappear into a series of meetings that felt less like conversations and more like auditions. She told indianexpress.com about one interaction in particular that lodged itself in her memory.
Within minutes of sitting down with a prospective match, the questions began: how would she manage office work, cooking and cleaning? His mother didn’t believe in house help. He’d need her to take over. When Sakshi pointed out that this sounded like he wanted a homemaker, he corrected her. He wanted a working partner too, because “expenses are easier to manage together.” He then offered to help her find a different job, one more compatible with her domestic responsibilities.
“That was the moment I realised this wasn’t about compatibility,” she says. “It was about control.” She walked away. She had to.
There was a second meeting that unsettled her in a different way. A man, on the very first meeting, asked her whether she’d be comfortable with him “being close to her” after returning from a party having drunk alcohol and eaten non-vegetarian food. “It wasn’t just the question,” she says. “It was the lack of sensitivity, the assumption of comfort, and the complete absence of emotional awareness.”
Meanwhile, in , Abhishek Vissapragada, 33, has spent five years on matrimonial apps and has had fewer than five meaningful interactions. His most baffling encounters include a family who rejected his profile because he lived ten kilometres away in the same city — “too far” — and another who asked him to fly to their city during peak cricket season only to cancel two days after he’d booked the tickets because, the family announced, “the horoscopes don’t match.” He now refers to kundali matching as “horrorscopes.” The stars, he notes drily, have never seemed to align.
His most philosophically interesting meeting was simpler. He asked a prospective match a hypothetical: would she support her husband if he left his job to pursue his passion? She didn’t answer. Her parents, however, told his parents that Abhishek seemed unstable and was clearly planning to quit his job soon. He was not.
“After all,” he asks, “how can you judge someone based on the information available on an app when the true personality of that person can only be known after you have met them a few times face-to-face?”
If there is a common thread running through these experiences, it is hypocrisy, a word that comes up almost reflexively when people discuss the process. Ripal describes men who wanted emotional openness, intelligence, and independence in theory, “but not if those qualities became inconvenient in practice.” She observed what she calls résumé-style self-branding: everyone is “family-oriented,” “simple,” and “well-settled,” phrases that can mean absolutely anything and often mean nothing. “It sometimes feels less like people are looking for connection and more like they’re curating a LinkedIn profile for marriage.”
Sakshi encountered something similar: the contradiction of wanting a financially independent partner while quietly expecting her to compromise that independence when required. Abhishek saw a girl’s profile listing a salary expectation of one crore per annum for a , while her own income was one lakh.
Lubna, 26, from a smaller town where the norms are even older and the rituals more entrenched, has seen this contradiction play out differently. In her community, brides are still presented to the groom’s family almost like objects on display: dressed, jewelled, seated with head bowed, for the family to evaluate. Her mother went through it at 16. “Now I am 26,” says Lubna, “and I haven’t sat a single time like that, because my father wants one family to come and accept me so that my self-esteem cannot be destroyed.”
But the underlying architecture of the process, she notes, has barely shifted. The most recent proposal to reach her family came from a boy one year and eight months younger than her. Her parents hesitated — older woman, younger man remains taboo — but were willing to overlook it. The boy’s family was not. They wanted a bride at least three years younger than the groom.
The proposal before that involved a family with an unspoken rule: daughters-in-law could visit their own parents only once a year and could not leave the in-laws’ house otherwise. “That was kind of weird in my opinion,” says Lubna. They declined immediately.
It would be easy to read these stories as darkly comic, and in many ways they are. But running beneath the absurdity is a psychological weight that therapists say has become distinctly modern.
“What has changed most is not the institution of arranged marriage itself, but the volume and velocity of it,” says Dr Komal Manshani, a licensed clinical psychologist, in a conversation with indianexpress.com.
Earlier, choices were contained within family networks. Now, matrimonial apps expose individuals to an endless stream of potential partners, with all the pressure that comes with it: emotional fatigue from repetition, ambiguity about how to read silence or rejection, and the feeling of being assessed for lifelong compatibility within a single meeting.
Psychologist and relationship expert Purvi Shah, founder of Mentally, points to the paradox of choice. “Dating apps clearly show us the paradox of choice,” she says. “People are not willing to commit to one and have difficulty settling based on the number of choices we have. And hence we eventually don’t take any decisions, but rather feel the pressure.”
What’s particularly corrosive, both experts agree, is the evaluation dynamic. Rejections in the arranged marriage process aren’t simply about incompatibility — they’re often framed around appearance, finances, family background, qualifications, or astrology. “Rejections are not wrapped around the simple logic of connection,” says Shah, “but rather background, appearance, or other worldly matters. This can make one question their presence and existence.”
Over time, Dr Manshani observes, people begin to internalise this external gaze. Clients start asking: “Am I not good enough, or just not the right fit?” And then, more troublingly: “Should I change something about myself to be more acceptable?”
Our parents, it turns out, may have had something we don’t. Not more love, or more luck, but perhaps more clarity. Fewer choices often meant faster decisions. Ripal recalls her mother, a Jain woman who married a Brahmin man in the 1980s, an unconventional match at the time, whose mother agreed partly because he came from a nuclear family, which meant no large household politics for her daughter to navigate.
“In many ways,” says Ripal, “I find that thinking far more progressive than a lot of what I encounter today.” Shah puts her finger on the structural problem: as a system has not evolved at the same pace as individual expectations.
Young adults today expect emotional intimacy, compatibility, and mutual respect as baseline requirements. The system, built for a different era, still often prioritises caste, status, income brackets, and horoscopes. The collision of those two realities is where much of the psychological damage happens.
Both psychologists are clear that navigating this process requires deliberate self-protection. Pace it intentionally, says Dr Manshani, and limit the number of meetings per week and resist the scroll. Shift the internal question from “do they like me?” to “do I feel comfortable, respected, and aligned here?” Build a personal compass: identify a handful of genuine non-negotiables and be honest about which preferences are merely preferences.
Shah’s advice cuts even simpler: slow down. Don’t invest emotionally too quickly based on a handful of positive interactions. Keep a life outside the search — work, friends, hobbies. These aren’t distractions; they’re what keep you stable when the process gets relentless. And don’t hesitate, she adds, to take breaks. The process is not a sprint.
Ripal’s story offers a quieter kind of reassurance. After years of exhausting interactions that nearly made her colour-blind to red flags, she met someone, and the decision arrived without drama. “There was no strategy, no performance. We met, clicked, got engaged, and had a court marriage. It was probably the easiest and simplest decision I have made.” They planned the wedding themselves, bypassed most of the ritual performance, and built something she describes as emotionally practical and progressive. “Marriage itself is not the problem,” she says. “The mindset around it often is.”
Lubna, who has watched the system up close and refused to become a mannequin in it, puts it in her own way: “I’ll be a human, and I’ll not bow to them. My self-respect and self-esteem will stay the same even after marriage.”
In a process that often asks people to shrink themselves, that might be the most progressive position of all.
