JEDDAH — The business of matchmaking — where potential brides and grooms use an intermediary to find a spouse — has gone high tech in recent years. For a fee of SR8, a spouse-seeker can send an SMS to a person registered through services offered through satellite television. Consider it a matchmaking version of Facebook or MySpace.
“I went for these channels after failing to find a wife for 12 years,” said Isam Al-Jund, a 37-year-old Egyptian living in Jeddah.
The number of such channels has risen to 10 in the past couple of years; most of them are Saudi owned. With names like, “My Bride”, “The Intermediate” and “Marriage”, these sites allow nuptial-seekers to set up accounts in order to trade information. The service offers contact information with the consent of both parties who can then make their own arrangements to meet.
An account holder provides name, age, address, description of their ideal spouse and other basic information. Users can provide more specific details if they want, such as smoking preference, or even more subjective requirements; a lot of users seem to be looking for “romantic” and “rich” spouses who “love to travel”.
An informal poll of registered users on several of these channels showed that a majority of the users are men in their mid-30s; other prominent nationalities on these services are Egyptian, Yemeni, Maghrabi and Syrian.
“By going for these channels they believe they can find partners with specific characteristics,” said Huda Al-Maghrabi, a psychologist in Jeddah.
Al-Maghrabi said the services could be used for good or bad purposes. On one side, she says these matchmaking services offer a convenient way for Arab expats to tap their own communities for spouses, especially among Arab foreigners living and working in Saudi Arabia. But, on the other hand, she says that the high number of people hiding their identities suggests that these match-seekers might be seeking spouses on the sly from their current wives. Many of them, mostly but not always men, openly request misyar partners.
“Most of these type of marriages do not last for long,” said Al-Maghrabi.
Misyar is a controversial form of no-obligation marriage where women forfeit traditional nuptial rights afforded them in traditional Islamic marriages. In many cases the husband hides the misyar mistress from his other wife or wives.
