Americans love Indian Matchmaking, a Netflix original that is exactly what it sounds like: a reality TV show about Mumbai’s top matchmaker, Sima Taparia. It’s a classic dating show about one of the most “trad” practices imaginable: arranged marriage. It’s at once a guilty pleasure and educational programming.
The thing that stands out most about Indian Matchmaking is its mass appeal. When it premiered in July 2020, seemingly everyone was watching and talking about it. Even the people who thought it was “problematic” seemed to love it — critics who jumped at the chance to say that the show ignored issues such as colorism, classism, caste supremacy, “renewed Orientalism,” and lookism freely admitted that it was, at the end of the day, an eminently watchable program.
For those whose families come from India, Bangladesh, or Pakistan, the show is ostensibly a welcome taste of home (and representation). For viewers without any personal connection to the subcontinent, it’s a glimpse into an alternate reality just beyond our reach, one very different from ours but that clearly has its appeal. It’s a reality free of dating apps and unlimited options, one in which the search for love is guided not only by our parents, the people who, in the best case, know us and love us best, but also by a third party whose whole job it is to set us up in a happy marriage. For Westerners sick of the at-times lonely and frustrating process of modern dating, it’s hard not to see the appeal.
Not that the characters on Indian Matchmaking are forced into anything. They have just enough romantic freedom to state their preferences to Sima, and they’re under no obligation to continue dating the matches she brings to them. But they also face constraints. Sima often chides her clients for being too picky. Pickiness, we learn, is the enemy of the single, marriageable Indian. In the pilot, we meet Aparna, who, at 34, finds herself single. Implicit in her introduction is light scorn for her unrealistic standards as she relays the story of why she stopped seeing a man after their first date: “He didn’t know that Bolivia had salt flats.”
Excuse me, what?
We also meet Pradhyuman, a kind of Indian Patrick Bateman, who is similarly too “discerning.” When we learn that he’s rejected 150 matches, we’re invited to ask, “What’s wrong with him?”
For American audiences, Indian Matchmaking is the antidote to a story we hear all too often.
So many of us have that friend (or perhaps we are that friend) who claims to want to be in a relationship but is still single despite going on three or four first dates a week. They just can’t find the right man or woman, and secretly, we’re all wondering, “What’s going on there?” Or rather, we know what’s going on: They’re too picky, their standards are too high or too low, they’re too desperate or not desperate enough, and they’re addicted to novelty.
There’s also no one and nothing in our culture that gives them the advice they need to hear: “Nobody’s perfect, so just pick someone already if you really want to settle down!” There’s only commiseration that it’s “tough out there,” or maybe that it’s hopeless.
Instead, our culture offers a lot of mixed messages and flat-out bad advice. On the one hand, there are the doom-and-gloom predictions about how millennials and zoomers will never find partners, even as the media regularly tout the joys of casual, no-strings-attached sex and the importance of delaying longer-term commitments until one reaches his or her 30s. Some outlets even go as far as to suggest hiring a sex worker if one can’t find a partner, endorsing the idea that the real problem with modern dating is that there isn’t enough transactional sex. It’s a sad state of affairs, to say the least.
The only places you can really find robust criticism of how Americans approach dating are on the fringes of online subcultures. The tragedy here is that some of these subcultures, such as the incels or even parts of the online Right, make salient points, but they’re often too shrouded in misogynist language to be considered or rebutted fairly by the media.
But the desire for something else is simmering somewhere deep in the American psyche. Most dating shows seem to speak to this desire to have someone or something step in and save us from the problem of too much choice. Indian Matchmaking does it with a veneer of tradition, but The Bachelor, to name one example, works much the same way. The bachelor is presented with a finite number of women. He learns to be happy with the lot he’s been given, picks one, and moves on. The relationships borne from these programs may not work in the long term, in real life, but within the narrative universe of reality TV, contestants and audiences alike are invested in them. It’s true love, true love that’s been able to flourish within a set of predetermined constraints.
Oh, what could be.
Katherine Dee is a writer and co-host of the podcast After the Orgy. Find more of her work at defaultfriend.substack.com or on Twitter: @default_friend.
