Looking to meet your potential partner, or perhaps your relatives are insisting that you do? There’s no shortage of dating and matrimonial sites and apps out there, but they don’t always take every important matter into account – many people hold things like religion, caste, horoscope, family background and social status into account when looking for a potential match. SpouseUp is a matrimonial app which is connected to you Facebook account, and takes into account your likes, shares, and interests on the social networking site. Like Tinder, SpouseUp searches within your friends and mutual friends on Facebook for matches and allows you to find matches within a few kilometers’ radius. This feature allows users to rest assured that any potential matches are much more likely to be legitimate people, and not be fooled by a fake profile. Another unique feature of SpouseUp is that users’ friends and family can play the part of a matchmaker and refer potential spouses – so those most insistent on maintaining that a potential match must also match in terms of caste and family background can have their way. But because of the importance of mutual interests on SpouseUp, there is less chance of the marriage failing than if it were left solely up to the relatives to find a partner without much input. Simply put, SpouseUp serves the purpose of keeping everyone involved more or less happy with the process and outcome.
Technology has come with the advantage of being able to communicate and form relationships with people on a personal level without needing to be in physical proximity. Given the paradigm of the internet and social media, there’s the ability to have basic interactions through a screen rather than face-to-face – which means that it’s both easier to speak your mind without any sort of hesitation, and also feel comfortable enough to be who they want to since they’re not physically present. This, of course, presents numerous implications for online dating and matrimonial sites, not all positive. SpouseUp is intended to solve the problem of finding a suitable match (while keeping all of your conservative aunties and uncles placated throughout the process, so it’s a win-win solution), and has been developed by highly experienced software professionals from leading tech firms. Founder Karthik Iyer realized that while the attitude towards marriage and life in general is changing amongst younger generations, the search for the right partner has not undergone any serious innovation. Aside from Karthik, the SpouseUp team consists of technologists, mathematicians, and other members who have a working understanding of human psychology. One such member is Vinod Cartic, IIT-Madras gold medalist in his B.Tech batch, and experienced adviser to large corporates in India and abroad.
While Karthik says that “we no longer make friends solely based on caste and religion; we bond over common interests and aren’t limited by our locations,” orthodox users can find comfort in the fact that SpouseUp does allow them to search by horoscope and religion. Once you find a potential match (or one is suggested by your friends or family), SpouseUp provides a chat environment for the duo to interact and find out if things can really work for them. And SpouseUp is still being developed to become even more useful – there is focus on building more algorithms based on other social networks as well, so more accurate analysis can be made.