Summary of results
The survey was conducted on 239 individual members who had marriages broken down and cases filed on them by their wives and are currently trapped in the legal process. The results of the survey show that in the majority of cases where the marriages broke down, the men had found their prospective matches through the matrimonial sites.
3. The reasons given by the participants for their separation from their wives varied from the below:
a) Abusive wives (57%),
b) Wife wanting to separate the man from his parents (61%),
c) Mood swings and temperamental issues (58%)
d) Wives having an affair (38%).
The results of the survey confirm that there is a real danger of the marriage breaking down if the man finds his spouse using one of these matrimonial sites, which have a lot of unverified information about the future wife. Specifically, vital facts such as information about the girl's current or past medical or psychological conditions and past legal cases is not presented or verified anywhere in these sites.
The trouble is, this danger is not well known or well highlighted and young men who make profiles on such sites to find a wife are completely vulnerable. Once the marriage happens, the innocent boy is trapped in an abusive marriage with no way out other than a multiple police and legal cases that can take years and lakhs of rupees to resolve. In this way, such matrimonial websites end up as traps for men.
Huge business for matrimonial sites
In most Western countries, dating websites and apps are the norm for adult men and women of all ages to get to know each other, go on dates and explore possibilities of a relationship based on romance and shared interests. Marriage comes last in the list of priorities and typically happens only after the couple has been in a stable relationship and living together for a number of years. In India, however, the norm in most cases is to first marry and only later really get to know the spouse. In this way, the matrimonial websites in India function as the equivalent of dating sites in the West (See 1).
These Indian matrimonial sites offer free as well as paid services to find a suitable husband or wife, and are widely used by urban and middle class professionals, not only those living and working in India but also by NRIs and persons of Indian origin living in the West.
With the growth of the middle classes living in big cities who are busy with their work and career and have limited time and energy to vet their future spouses, such services have largely replaced traditional community based matchmakers.
However, the community matchmakers had the advantage of intimately knowing the girl and their family and highlighting potentially troubled marriages before they occurred. Such protection is missing in the current matrimonial websites functioning as matchmakers.
The charges for looking for a spouse from these websites vary and can run into thousands of rupees for just a few months. The turnover of prominent matrimonial sites such as Shaadi.com (revenue of USD 30 million or rupees 2000 millions) [2] and BharatMatrimony (2500 millions) [3] runs into hundreds of crores of Rupees and they are used by millions of people. Together, such sites corner a chunk of the huge Indian marriage market is whose size is over 10 lakh millions[4].
Danger to men from failed marriages
Looking at it from one angle, such matrimonial sites offer a valuable service to families to get a nice bride or groom for their relatives. They combine relative affordability and convenience and thus fulfill a social demand. However what is lesser known is that given the one sided female friendly laws in India and the media fueled widespread misandry, such sites are a trap for young and vulnerable men.
Often pressurized to marry by their families and society once they get a job and in their mid-20s or early 30s, millions of young men in India or their families use such sites to find their potential wives. There is typically very little contact between the spouses before the actual marriages take place. This gives very less or no chance for the husbands to examine their future life partners before taking such a huge life changing decision.
In cases where their wives turn out to be abusive, the men become victims of psychological, sexual, emotional and financial abuse within their marriage. The society does not take seriously reports by a man that he is abused by his own wife and rather ends up ridiculing him for not being able to control his wife. Often, the old parents of the boy also end up undergoing such abuse from their daughter in law.
While there are a number of well-funded women's NGOs where a woman can go, the number of resources for men is minuscule and so a harassed husband has no protection and nowhere to go to report abuse from his wife
In cases when the marriages break down completely, these young men additionally get trapped in false legal cases filed by their wives, aided by the by one sided laws like IPC 498a and Domestic Violence Act, and targeted by the divorce industry of police, lawyers, counsellors, feminist NGOs and judges working in collusion with each other as a nexus.
The extent of the false matrimonial cases is so much that even the Hon. Supreme Court of India has termed the 498a as 'legal terrorism'. On one hand the judiciary crib at not having enough resources to tackle the ever growing list of cases, on the other hand the same judiciary has no hesitation in putting the entire responsibility of failed marriages on young men by applying huge alimony and maintenance settlements, as well as drag cases on for years while the men are harassed by the police and often have to take leaves from their jobs and travel far to their wives' cities to fight the false Domestic Violence, dowry or maintenance cases filed on them.
Together with the pressures at work, such one sided laws drive lakhs of men to suicides and result in a situation where the number of married men's suicides is double that of married women, as per the National Crime Records Bureau's own data.
Role of matrimonial sites in failed marriages
So where is the role of the matrimonial sites in this huge racket? The problem comes where these sites do not have a proper vetting process for women who put up profiles in their sites. The only process they have is verification of telephone numbers and in some cases uploading of certificates such as degrees to discourage false profiles. These too came as a result of pressure from NGOs and feminist activists [5] who claim that there are large cases of fake profiles by Indian men looking for girls to have sex in one night stands in the name of marriage.
There is no verified health data, psychological and past legal case data of the girls listed in the profiles. Nor are there any penalties in the law on the girls or their families for putting false data. In short, there is little or no regulation of such matrimonial websites by the government. Mostly, such girls would already be exposed in their circles and communities and hence matrimonial websites come to the rescue of such girls to prey for an innocent man who would be looking for a good girl for marriage.
Given the large number of failed marriages and ongoing matrimonial cases, a vast majority of which are false as we often read about rampant misuse of marriage laws, what is the guarantee such sites can give to men to make sure their prospective wives are not previous 498a or DV case filers? What is the guarantee that the girl does not have a current psychological or medical condition which their family members have been hiding to get the girl quickly married off?
What is the compensation offered to their customers, who have paid thousands or tens of thousands of rupees for a paid membership, by such sites in cases where the wives are serial case filers and the husbands have to cough up lakhs of rupees in alimony and monthly maintenance?
Conclusion
Given the huge cost to men in emotional, financial and psychological terms from a failed or abusive marriage, aided by the biased women centric laws, it is no exaggeration to say that use of unverified information in matrimonial websites present a huge risk for men. Millions of young men are walking into a huge trap for life by selecting women with such unverified data.
If you are a marriageable man reading this, know that putting your profile and selecting a girl as your life partner from such matrimonial websites is a huge and costly risk. If you marry through matrimonial websites, there is more than 50% chance that you will end up in a nasty marriage, as a man, and go through arduous legal proceedings while trying to break free of the tumultuous marriage.
What we propose is for the government to strictly regulate such sites and ensure that the information posted on such sites includes verified medical and legal information.
References
3. http://www.medianama.com/2015/08/223-matrimony-ipo
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