WUNRN
Iran-Declining Birth Rates & Rising Marriage Ages-Government-Run Selective Matchmaking Site
By Elahe Izadi - June 16, 2015
What’s a country to do
when faced with declining birthrates and rising marriage ages? Start a
government-run matchmaking website, apparently.
That’s what Iranian
officials did Monday when launching a state-supported matchmaking Web site with
the goal of producing 100,000 new marriages over the next year, Agence
France-Presse reported.
“We have high demand for
marriage and 11 million bachelors who are increasing every day,” Deputy
Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports Mahmoud Golzari said Monday, the Associated
Press reported.
But this is no OKCupid or
Match.com; those sites are banned in Iran. Users have to detail their
ages, physical characteristics, hobbies, interests, languages spoken, and
levels of education and religiosity. Then a real-life matchmaker finds another
user within the database who seems like a suitable spouse.
“The matchmaking Web site
you are seeing today is not a Web site for introducing boys and girls to each
other,” Golzari said, according to the AP report.
And there’s
a greater political dimension behind the Web site, as AFP reported:
The move has been
triggered by deep unease in the Islamic republic, where sex outside marriage is
forbidden, that the family unit is eroding and by fears of a potential fall in
population.
At pains to point out it
was not an online dating service, officials said the “Find Your Equal” website
hoped to reverse a surge in numbers, currently 11 million, of young single
adults.
It will use a network of matchmakers —
clerics and professionals of good standing in their communities, such as
doctors and teachers — to try to pair people off.
The government has made
other moves in response to declining birthrates, which, according to
state estimates, stands at 1.8 children per woman, below the 2.1
needed to replenish the population as people die. Last year, the state banned
vasectomies and permanent forms of birth control in women. Officials such as Iran’s
supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have publicly
called for Iranians to have more babies to
repudiate “undesirable aspects of Western lifestyles.”
As far as state
sponsors of matchmaking go, Iran isn’t alone. Taiwan’s Interior Ministry organizes matchmaking activities.
Japan has long faced
declining birthrates; in 2010, it dropped to 1.34
children per woman, falling short of the minimum thought needed to
keep a constant population in a developed country. And much of the decline
has been
attributed to women delaying marriage or skipping it altogether. In
2010, the provincial government in Fukui launched a dating Web
site called Fukui Marriage-Hunting Cafe, and couples who met on the site
and eventually married received cash and gifts.
As Akemi Iwakabe,
deputy director of Fukui’s children and families division, explained to The Post in 2010: “Many
of our single residents were telling us that they wanted to get married but
couldn’t because they weren’t meeting anyone.” Yes, it isn’t just you: Meeting
dateable singles is a dilemma all over the world.