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........

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