The Rishta Process Is Broken — And Here's Why

It used to work. In Pakistan, in Bangladesh, in Gujarat, in Sylhet — the rishta system was a functioning social infrastructure. Aunties with encyclopaedic knowledge of every eligible bachelor and bachelorette in a five-mile radius. Mothers who knew which families were "good families." Networks of trust built over decades where everyone's reputation preceded them. The system was imperfect, but it worked because it was embedded in community life.

Then those communities moved to Britain. And the rishta system came with them — but the environment it depended on didn't.

What the Rishta System Actually Relied On

The traditional rishta process was effective for specific structural reasons that are easy to overlook. It operated within dense, geographically concentrated communities where people knew each other personally. Reputation was a real currency — families had track records, and the matchmaker (formal or informal) could vouch for both parties based on genuine knowledge. The pool of eligible candidates was visible and contained. And the social expectation that young people would marry relatively young and relatively quickly created a steady, predictable flow through the system.

It also — and this is important — didn't require the individuals themselves to do much. The system worked around them. Young people didn't need to know how to present themselves to strangers, how to articulate what they wanted in a partner, or how to navigate the early stages of a relationship. The family handled all of that. For a certain type of person and community, this was perfectly fine.

Why It Fails in Modern Britain

In the UK, virtually every one of those structural conditions has changed.

The community is dispersed. British Muslims are spread across cities, suburbs, and towns across the country. Your Pakistani auntie in Luton doesn't know the family in Cardiff. The dense local networks that made matchmaking efficient no longer exist at scale.

Reputation networks are fractured. Even within the same city, families from the same background may have little connection to each other. The informal vetting that came from community knowledge is largely gone. Parents are being asked to make decisions about families they have no meaningful information about.

The candidates themselves have changed. Second and third generation British Muslims have grown up with different expectations about partnership, communication, and compatibility. They want to assess a match based on conversation and connection, not just family background. The rishta system, as traditionally structured, doesn't accommodate this well.

Privacy expectations have changed. Many young British Muslims are uncomfortable with the traditional rishta process precisely because it involves their personal details being passed around community networks without their control or consent. Who knows who. Who's being rejected. What reasons were given. This information travels, and its travel can affect someone's prospects and reputation.

"My mum gave my details to her friend, who told someone at the mosque, who told a family I didn't even know. I found out through a cousin. I felt humiliated."

The Auntie Problem

The informal community matchmaker — affectionately or otherwise known as the "rishta auntie" — deserves her own paragraph. At her best, she is a genuine asset: well-connected, motivated by goodwill, with a gift for assessing compatibility. At her worst — and this is regrettably common — she applies criteria that reflect her own biases (skin colour, family status, wealth, caste) rather than actual compatibility. She may exaggerate a candidate's qualities in one direction and minimise them in another. And she operates with no accountability.

There is no feedback mechanism. There is no way to check whether she has accurately represented either party. There is no recourse if a match is made on false premises. For a process as consequential as marriage, this lack of accountability is a serious structural flaw.

The Speed Problem

Traditional rishta processes often operate under an implicit expectation that decisions should be made quickly — sometimes after just one or two supervised meetings. This made sense when families knew each other and the reputational vetting had already done most of the work. It makes considerably less sense when two strangers are meeting for the first time, often in a formal and somewhat artificial setting, and being asked to make life-altering decisions on the basis of a couple of hours together.

The result is either rushed decisions that lead to incompatible marriages, or candidates who repeatedly say no — not because there's anything wrong with the person they met, but because they genuinely can't tell in the allotted time whether this is someone they could spend their life with.

What a Modern Rishta Process Should Look Like

The core values of the rishta system — families involved, intentions clear, process supervised, commitment serious — are sound and worth preserving. What needs to change is the infrastructure.

A functioning modern rishta process should:

• Allow individuals to have meaningful input into who they meet, rather than being presented with candidates chosen entirely by others.
• Provide enough time and structured interaction to genuinely assess compatibility — not just a first impression.
• Include identity verification so both parties can be confident they are who they say they are.
• Involve family at the right time — early enough to be meaningful, not so early that it short-circuits the individual's own assessment.
• Operate with clear intentions from both sides — that this is a search for a marriage partner, not casual interest.

The Opportunity in the Breakdown

The failure of the old rishta model, while genuinely painful for many families, has created space for something better. Platforms and communities that can carry the values of the traditional rishta — seriousness of intent, family involvement, Islamic framing — into a modern, practical format have an enormous opportunity to serve a community that is genuinely underserved.

The question is not whether the rishta process should be preserved. It should, in spirit. The question is whether we're willing to update the method — to be honest about what's not working, and to build something that actually does.