How to maintain your sanity using Muzmatch (and my experience searching for a Bengali Bride)
By: Jg Hall
Tags: Bengali, Marriage, Allah, Muslim, Islam

It wasn’t my idea — two and a half years ago we thought we found the solution to ending my single lifestyle of waking up at 12pm on weekends, and planning my meals around Just Eat. By ‘we’ I mean my mother. At that time, everyone knew about the OG SingleMuslim.com (which you should avoid at all costs. Think I’m being cynical? Try it, see how long you last). But SingleMuslim.com wasn’t for the cool kids of my generation, us kids (now winging-it adults) who grew up with Tamagotchi, the golden age of Cartoon Network, and the N64. We needed something slick, stylish, fun.

So there’s Muzmatch — slick and stylish with the millennial in mind, but definitely not fun. Now, keep in mind this is mostly an opinion piece that’s meant to sooth my dithering last strand of sanity. Back to ‘we’, my mother.

It was on a whim I mentioned such a thing existed, only as a passing comment at the breakfast table — little did I expect mother to think that somehow by this knowledge of a new, hip, Muslim matchmaking service — we have hit the jackpot. It just so happened I first mentioned Muzmatch whilst creeping through my mid-twenties, where the obvious need to begin my next stage of life became more apparent daily. Sure, lodging with parents has benefits for them as I pay for the rent and weekly shopping — but at this point they’d prefer some grandchildren. My parents became less ambiguous with their hints of ‘are any of your friends getting married?’, to ‘we need to get you married’.

I am the only child, so my parents have no first-hand experience at any matchmaking. No awkward Rishta meetings (Desi’s will know), no scouting exercises between Bradford to London, no negotiating mahr and deciding on a wedding hall, no having to deal with the scrutiny of income or what village we came from ‘back home’. None of it, neither parents even once spoke to another auntie or uncle at the Masjid to enquire about a suitor, — you can gather perhaps that, both mother and father have very little experience helping to find a bride. To my parents, it was a daunting task to begin searching.

But now, this was it — we envisioned Muzmatch to be a banquet of brides where would take any pick and probably be married in the next 6 months. Of course that’s how my mother perceived it, my father was still out the loop with the concept so didn’t bother to take much interest, and there was myself on the front line trying to make sense of my newfound mission to find a life partner.

I was just as clueless. I didn’t understand women, or the world — coming from a practising household my interaction with women in my University days were quite limited, and the workplace was no better as I couldn’t make very good small talk at the water machine. Either way, there were no Muslim women in my workplace to make small talk with (all in the intention of marriage if ever I did do small talk).

Meeting your life partner is for some an organic occurrence, a fellow classmate, childhood acquaintance, colleague or just a good ol’ masjid uncle recommendation can put two in a lifelong and Akhirah-bound relationship. That sounds nice. I one day woke up and was given the hint all my friends are getting married, thus began picking up the pieces to get myself in the wedding carriage.

After some keen contemplation on my best photos, and spending a needlessly, excruciatingly long time on writing my profile bio (I gave more attention to that profile than my University dissertation), my Muzmatch profile was live.

Now, it was the waiting game. Any day now, just, any moment… we would find my wife-to-be and then we could all happily delete my account and carry on with our new union of souls and… wait a minute. This isn’t working.

A few days turned to weeks, and then months before we realised none of my swiping attempts were amassing to anything worthwhile, the gradual routine became a case of hoping the more I would cast my rod further to sea, the higher the chance of getting a catch. In this instance, all I had to do was swipe more, and more. But, my pool of potentials became evidently lacking.

I know, I know — believe me I know there are a lot of factors in place. Despite hundreds of swipes and instant chats in the high double digits, I’m the same singleton I was two and half years ago when I first opened an account. Getting a match was like a lottery spin, and the cost was not only the subscription fees but gradually my self esteem and confidence.

And like I said above, I know there could be multiple factors for little matchmaking success. The most obvious thing that comes to mind is I could really just be so unsightly no one will spend long enough on my profile to read it and consider. Or, perhaps my profile read like a five year old who recently mastered reading ‘Green Eggs and Ham’. So, my pictures and profile went through scrutiny until absolute certainty I looked presentable enough to not look like a shut-in weeb and my profile portrayed a greater depth than a shallow puddle.

Evidently, none of that has worked after these two years. I can count the number of decent conversations in that time, any decent means someone who was serious enough to consider getting parents involved. Maths was never my favourite subject but I’m counting three to five fingers, so yeah, one hand is enough to count those conversations.

This is where my opinion piece will become very subjective and personal — I am half Bengali, I want a Bengali wife as preference. My day one preference (best looks and the best cooks). No hard task right? I mean, c’mon, we are, everywhere in the UK. Each Indian takeaway is owned by Bengalis, dozens of Bengali communities, ‘Deshi Masaajid, and we have a strong presence, again, everywhere.

Growing up, at family and other Bengali family weddings, I was some kind of an unique novelty (but not in an objectifying way) to both relatives and guests. Family from afar would be excited to see the ‘white’ side of the family, both because they liked me genuinely but it was something different. They loved to see me eat dhaal and hutki with my hands, wear Shalwar Kameez, attempt butchered Bengali sentences and add a bit of contrast to family photos (I am very white — during my fetal genetic structuring phase I borrowed no South Asian DNA).

Family weddings were the highlight of any and all Asian families (ideally, that is, I can’t speak for ever Desi family’s enjoyment or approval of their weddings). And as I gradually grew from eighteen onward I would get the expected cheeky comments from aunties and uncles of ‘you’ll be next’, ‘he’s handsome! They’ll be throwing themselves at him’, and reassuring my mum ‘You’ll have your hands full trying to pick out a bride for him!’. Well, none of that seemed to be true in the end.

My parents and family never suggested I consider a Bengali wife at any point. It was something I held at the back of my mind because it’s what I liked, growing up very close to my Bengali households it was what I wanted for the next phase, married life.

So, being very deep and connected with our local Bangladeshi community, there was a subconscious thought that finding a Bengali wife would somehow happen… organically. As the years went by, people graduate, get jobs, pass their driving test, all that good stuff to enter adult life, no one really asked about me to marry their daughters, and that’s okay — it just meant that in my locality most of the girls my age were starting to get hitched to usually older men elsewhere, shrinking the pool of potentials.

If you are a Bengali (or any flavour of Desi) in the UK, I’m certain you’ve encountered the tradition of the Rishta search going outside of your locality. In fact, no one in my family has ever married someone from their own city. This is something I could never quite get my head around but the idea was that finding someone out of your locality meant there was uh… a greater formality to the process? I’m not sure, I never asked but it was definitely fun as a kid to hop onto a coach or all squeeze into one car for a road trip to a different city to meat my new Bhabi or Mama, and relatives. As history repeats itself, all the Bengali girls in my locality were taking their searches to outside our city.

The key thing I noticed is, their searches were all done by word of mouth or a CV exchange. All the while I continued my Muzmatch swiping routine, the majority of Bengali girls I found resided in Birmingham, Bradford, and London, with a good sprinkling across the rest of the UK — all about a 2 hour car drive away.

I said this opinion piece will get personal, as this is solely my own experience — but I’m sure any others who have used Muzmatch or similar will face some shared experiences which could be a whole separate article. To get those out the way, these are my general criticisms:

Being based on the ‘slot machine’ design of ‘just one more go’ — there’s no real benefit to the swiping design instead of just a database of profiles. Swiping attempts to make the experience novel, like you’re working towards something, and if you haven’t quite got the right ‘match’ it encourages you to keep swiping from the fear of missing out. Unless you swipe, you will never know if that could be your wife on the next profile — which hijacks your brain into ‘doomswiping’, endless, mindless, and eventually hopeless swiping (like doomscrolling, a real thing) into the late hours of the night.

If you don’t pay for a subscription, you are greatly limited to how you can refine your search, and have a limited number of swipes (it even costs to ‘boost’ your profile so more users see you, and, it can even cost just to send someone a message. Yes, a single message that has no guarantee of a response). There’s a certain pressure that if you aren’t putting money into your subscription, that your search will be restricted (and you’ll be unmarried for longer)

The design is based off apps initially made by non-Muslims designed for a fling (an app beginning with ‘T’). Whereas now, dating apps made by non-Muslims are moving towards an approach of making genuine connections and not relying on staying in the app (begins with ‘H’).

The general synthetic feeling, seeing such a high volume of people ‘swiped’ makes it difficult to gauge true value between people and can skewer your perception. You will begin to see people like trading cards with stats than a real person. You may begin to feel rejected at a higher rate or that after swiping ‘left’ for so long that you’ll never find someone right for you. You will see tens upon tens of profiles that have viewed you but not interacted which causes you to double think and feel paranoid about what’s wrong with you.

Linking to the above, and the synthetic nature of digital, fast matchmaking, people don’t tend to have a sense of accountability (so will not reply for days, will ‘ghost’, or talk to 5 people at any one time). You’re just another profile on the screen amongst many others. Not only that, statistically men receive noticeably less interaction, with women typically receiving five times more messages then men (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/02/06/the-virtues-and-downsides-of-online-dating/). That means, women need to do less searching on these types of apps, you’re gonna need to really stand out guys.

Muzmatch feels much more like a dating app than a Matrimonial app. One second you’ll see a women in a Burka with Niqab, the next swipe over is ‘Princ3ssNaz’ in a night club taking a dank Shisha puff. The app doesn’t do a good enough job to try an cultivate an Islamic environment — your eyes will see things best avoided for the sake of your spiritual well-being.

Linking on from sporadic nature of the app, I have lost count of profiles that only say ‘Like Netflix and traveling, message to find out more’.

So along with everything mentioned above, my own search for a Bengali bride met two common hurdles. I would trip over both hurdles landing flat on my face early on in the race, if not, at the last turn they would be there ready to get me.

I’ll start with the hurdle that bothered me least, distance. Between the generation of my cousins and family about a decade or two older, we’ve changed as a community. Most of our first and second generation immigrant family members in the UK didn’t seem to mind moving further out to new cities settling down with their Groom. As said, I observed this myself, all of my male relatives found their wives in further out cities, and all my female relatives re-located to their new home cities. Tears and homesickness were expected initially, but all was well and good in the end.

The average driving distance for all said new brides and grooms in the family was about two hours. Typically nowadays, the girls I’ve spoken with that live the same distance are less favourable about the idea of moving out their immediate city, which I can understand. Times have changed — but I have made this observation with the majority women looking to get married on apps like Muzmatch. My (Bengali) married friends mostly found their brides from a different city, so if someone is looking further afar, the CV or word of mouth route looks to be the way to go.

And I don’t blame any girl for wanting to stay close to home, it is after all, the place they’ve known as home the longest. I don’t think I need to take a pre-marriage course to at least guess staying closer to home may help quell some of the uncertainties and anxiety of newly-married life.

As a family we were nonetheless surprised that even the parents of said girls were in favour of staying local. I think our surprise stemmed from growing up seeing the trend of relocating in Bengali communities and expecting similar. We moved passed this and realised the need to start looking closer (at least on Muzmatch).

The second hurdle is one I came to gradually accept, but frustrated me the most — and even when coming to terms it did leave me with a sense of apathy. That hurdle in my search was being mixed race — a lot of Bengali girls’ families were not willing to consider a half Bengali.

It was such an important criteria, many initial responses from girl’s I’d message first, were the polite and thoughtful suggestion to not take things further as they knew their parents wouldn’t consider a non-Bengali. You read that right, ‘non-Bengali’, the language stuck out like a cardamom in a biryani to me — not quite what you expect in the first mouthful, but had a feeling it might be there anyways. It wasn’t uncommon for me to considered a totally different ethnicity or culture because I was half Bengali.

It was common to see ‘Bengali only please’ in profiles, often accented by ‘(parents’ preference)’. So, being a half Bengali that enjoys fish, wears a lungi, and knows how to navigate the Bengali vegetable aisle (I can pick out the best Khodu no problem) — I’d surely fall under ‘Bengali’. Nope.

The very first conversation I ever had with a Bengali girl on Muzmatch lasted about three days before we reached a point where the only next step was to tell each other’s parents. Like the idiot I am thinking I’ll be married soon, I tell my parents what we’ve discussed so far, and we wait to hear back from the other side. Instead the girl wasn’t able to tell her parents — I received a message to the effect of “I feel really bad, but my parents didn’t know I was talking to a white guy and I just feel so bad telling them now, I’ll have to try and convince them and let you know how it goes”.

That is paraphrased to the best of my memory, but I still see the words ‘white guy’ with pristine clarity in my memory.

Immediately she unmatched and I never did hear back, but upwards and onwards — don’t forget, at this point, we still thought we held a banquet of Bengali brides in our hand.

As I learned the (t)ropes of Muzmatch (more-so the culture of the app than how to use it), and put a fair bit of cash into my subscription, the trend started to become evident each conversation. The exact same reason for not talking much further repeated in the majority of conversations I tried to initiate — or if I ‘organically’ matched, when it came to crunch time to tell parents, it would all come to a stop with: “My family prefer someone full Bengali, sorry”. But, credit to the girls for trying at least.

In between those attempts, were fleeting conversations never amassing to much due to other factors, work, in-law preferences, timescales to marry, when to have kids etc. I had to bear in mind that most girls on the app were ‘ghosting’ or simply not replying just by the sheer amount of interaction they received daily so I was never too hung up.

What did happen eventually is, I began each session of swiping and searching with intense apathy. If I wasn’t ghosted or instant-blocked, or a conversation went further than ‘Assalamu Alaikum’, I was expecting… nothing good to come of it, eventually. I was ready for rejection.

I still, as the cool kids say, would ‘shoot my shot’ and try a match or conversation, and wait to receive either distance being a problem (understandable) or my being half white a problem (understandable, but frustrating). In the end it was predictable, I only persisted swiping and messaging for the sake of the subscription payment.

About six months in, I called it quits when the pattern was more a guarantee than a simple series of similar events. I was re-currently getting the same profiles come my way and didn’t feel confident in approaching anyone else new, not only that, I on average received a message about… once a month? It was low, that’s all I remember, and eventually shut down my account.

At this point, we were hit by the Covid-19 lock down, meaning the new matchmaking CV I wrote was pretty difficult to get out there, people just weren’t looking by word of mouth at that point because of the uncertainty we faced. And then I thought, if everyone is stuck inside on their phones, then maybe Muzmatch is worth another go?

It made perfect sense, more people at home, with more time on their hands, meant more opportunities for a bit of digital matchmaking, surely?. And yes, I was wrong to be expecting anything different.

Whilst there were new people to view, things were much more limited with distance, and the same patterns occurred in my search for a Bengali bride. This time around I did get a bit more variety, with messages, some would say ‘You seem like a nice person, I’d like to talk but I know it won’t go very far with my parents’. I was quite happy to receive un-matches along those lines because hey, it was still a compliment right?

But, about another six months of doomswiping, and facing ghosting after ghosting and unmatch after unmatch, all with similar reasoning, I felt jaded to my efforts and thew in the lungi yet again. The whole Covid-19 quarantining didn’t help, but my psyche and spiritual well-being began to feel muddier as the swipes went on, until my perception of reality was totally warped.

It was as if, I had seen every Bengali girl in the UK, and I wasn’t able to find a single one where we could progress enough to seriously discuss getting married. Friends and family younger than me eventually found their brides and grooms as restrictions lifted, at this point my mind was struggling to grasp the actual reality.

Was I that ugly? That dull I couldn’t hold a conversation? That financially destitute I couldn’t relocate to wherever we wanted?

I felt that, all I wanted to do was find someone good to settle down and give my parents a peace of mind their only child found a life partner. And when that wasn’t happening, when everyone else around me did find what I wanted, that I really was no good and needed to stop ever hoping.

The gloom didn’t lift from morning to dusk, and sleeping and waking felt harder as my thoughts became muddy with uncertainty and doubt of who I was and why I couldn’t seem to make it quite work. I felt a weight of ‘failure’ chained to me despite doing all the expected; graduate, get a good job, learn to drive and get that first family car, have a roof — as those scathing musings of ‘what went wrong’ circulated my days and nights, the path was dangerous if I didn’t catch my steps and see the direction I was heading, because a bitter man is not a good man.

I needed to give my head and heart a break, and decided on a long term break of no searching whatsoever.

As the days went by post-subscription cancellation, my brain snapped back to a healthy perception of people and circumstances. It was like, the constant swiping, rejections, and money for subscriptions re-wired my brain to a state of constant anxiety and anticipating the worse. It seeped into other parts of my life including my job, I started to feel wired towards failure and believing I wasn’t capable to achieve what I wanted.

The true reality was my time was not written by the One who Ordains, and I used my new found freedom from the grasps of doomswiping as an opportunity to re-frame my perception and tell fact from fiction. Soon after, I took it as a chance to try and focus a greater reliance on Ar-Razzaq, a spiritual opportunity you could say.

At this point in time, what I now feel is a sense of ease when shifting the focus to Tawwakul and making my best effort with other avenues, and I would recommend those on a similar path give some time to seclusion to check your psyche and soul.

If you are ever going to use Muzmatch, this would be my advice to hold onto your sanity:

Seriously consider other options as your primary search. A CV, word of mouth/Whatsapp Groups, the masjid, your institution of Islamic study, and of course relying on Allah’s fadl (grace) and making Du’a. Matchmaking apps should only be your secondary search pathway.

Put a strict timer on how long you will browse — 20 minutes was enough for one day.

If it’s effecting your psyche and soul, or becoming a Fitnah, don’t be afraid to get rid of it. I only ever opened an account because it was with the knowledge of my parents who knew I was looking for a wife and nothing else.

If you will only write one to two lines maximum saying ‘I like food, Netflix, and going out. Message to find out more’, do everybody a favour and delete your account.

Realise un-matches or getting instant blocked/ghosted is not personal a lot of the time — people are busy, talking to someone else first, or are subject to the preference of their parents.

Remember that they are real people on the other end, that means you still have to be courteous with how you interact.

Have a sense of your ‘walk away point’, because some are on the app just for fun and wasting time. I gave myself a limit of 3 days, where that was enough time to determine if we had enough similarity and determine what was most important, to take things further. If after 3 days the conversation was going nowhere despite my efforts, I’d politely move on.

Make sure you are fully aware of getting yourself involved in a synthetic, shallow method of matchmaking. The lack of any real human interaction on a deeper level than someone’s best Eid pictures or a pretentious profile will become tiresome soon.

As a final disclaimer, the above is all purely an anecdote of my experiences and more a culture piece of writing than anything else. I am still in search of my Bengali bride, but differently.

May Allah grant us from his grace, and may we seek in a way most pleasing to Him.