Gone are the days when girl met boy along with his parents, over a cup of tea and biscuits. Gone too are the days when a cousin's marriage was fertile ground for match making. Or asking a well meaning relative or friend to look for prospective matches for your son or daughter.



In the cyber era, a conventional advertisement in the matrimonial classifieds section of a newspaper is no longer enough to find your dream mate. Instead, if you want to hear wedding bells ring, replace cupid's arrow with your cursor and voila! You have a match made in cyberspace.

The Net is no longer regarded with suspicion as a meeting and dating avenue, but is more serious, committed and thousands of people are tying the knot thanks to the new matchmakers in town- matrimonial portals.

And it is not just busy professionals who are e-mailing or chatting with prospective spouses on the net, but parents are also putting up the profiles of eligible sons and daughters on these portals. So what makes online matrimony “click” better than conventional avenues of finding your match? Well, here are a few:

*The key advantage in these matrimonial websites is that they can be accessed 24x7 that too from any corner of the world. Unlike a newspaper classified, your advertisement does not get restricted to a specific region. So, you can contact any person from Chandigarh to Canada.

* This is the medium of immediate results. You can create your profile, talk at length about yourself, your family and hobbies (each profile gets an entire page) create your photo album and start receiving proposals instantly.

* Ease of communication is another reason, why the net is an ideal medium for matrimony. Unlike the print medium, you do not have to wait interminably for proposals to come in, but at a nominal fee, can contact prospective matches via e-mail and chat. And the response time is also faster than waiting for the postman to ring your doorbell.

*You can streamline your search according to your own preferences, contact the person you like, accept or decline their proposals on your own terms. And if you are shy to contact anyone, then don't worry people who like your profile will certainly send you proposals.

*You can control your privacy level by filtering out the people whom you don't want to contact and even from whom you don't want to receive contacts. Also you can contact or chat with a person without disclosing your details.

Last but not the least, the net is the perfect medium for people who shy away from an “arranged marriage” but have yet not found the love of their lives. The net helps them to get to know their prospective spouses better even before the conventional meeting is “arranged” over tea!

All this cannot be availed through an offline medium i.e. through a newspaper classified or a marriage bureau where the reach of the medium is limited and one has to pay even before understanding the pros and cons of that medium. The advertisement will be of a few column centimeters and may not even catch anybody's attention. You would also need to do some paper work in order to maintain a list of the people contacted.

Hence, we can surely say that online matrimony is the easiest route to the most difficult destination- “the happily ever after” of marriage.