Hey Mom, Call Me When You Find My Wife

Tom Bloom

Some mothers â€" and some fathers, too â€" will do just about anything to see their marriage-age offspring settle down, even if that means going where parents ordinarily should never go â€" online and into their children’s posted dating profiles.

“It’s almost like outsourcing your online dating to your mom,” said Kevin Leland, chief executive of TheJMom.com, a Jewish matchmaking site and one of several Web sites that have arisen to cater to parents, some with more money than patience, who want to see that ideal match made.

Some Korean-American mothers who claim that it is their prerogative, or at least it should be, to be granted the right of first refusal on their children’s marital selections, are known to search the Web for mates on sites like Duo. Duo is a traditional matchmaking service based in South Korea that also has a Web site designed to cater to the hopes and ideals of the parents first and the children second. Some 80 percent of the site’s clients are mothers inquiring on behalf of their sons, according to Julia Lee, whom Duo refers to as a couples coordinator. Often, she said, “the parents pay for the service and give them as a surprise gift for the children.” That gift involves filling out a 160-question survey of a candidate’s characteristics, which is then entered into the company€™s matching system.

With Duo, where annual fees can range from $2,000 to $5,000, and include seven to nine introductions, parents monitor the dating progress of their children. “Parents project their lives onto children,” Hyae-Jeong Kim, Duo’s chief executive, said in an e-mail. “Also, parents think that they are one of the decision-makers because they think that the marriage is not only a union between a man and a woman, but also two families.”

While Ms. Kim admits that the parents often have a stronger desire than do their children to see a marriage take place, she said the pursuit on the part of these parents is rooted in the belief that long-term happiness is contingent on the successful union of two people raising a family together. TheJMom.com bills itself as an online community with 5,000 registered members that offers Jewish “matchmaking, mom’s way.” Its goal-oriented mothers, fathers and even grandmothers share online profiles of their ready-to-wed (or not) children.

Mr. Leland said that these profiles are written “in a way that makes the other moms want to be their in-laws and spend Thanksgivings together, spend holidays together and spend Hanukkah and Passover together.” So, unlike some dating sites, sexy is not the selling point here. “We don’t want to be too risqué,” he said. “This is a very wholesome site.”

Barbara Weisberg, 64, the mother who inspired the site’s development, recognized that her own children were missing out. “They maybe were looking superficially for attraction and they were not looking deep enough to see everything that encompasses a person,” said Mrs. Weisberg, who has been married for nearly 40 years and lives in Kentucky. So on a whim one night, she reviewed the online matches of her son, Brad â€" with his permission â€" and within hours, she had made a list of candidates who she felt would promise a love connection. “Bradley, did you notice this girl and that girl?” she recalled pointing out. The results yielded by these mom-engineered picks were so good that Brad Weisberg, 32, and his sister, Danielle Weisberg, 29, both based in Chicago, began the TheJMom.com site in 2010.

Posting and browsing on TheJMom.com is free, and a six-month subscription package, which provides contacts and connections, starts at $78. The $199 premium service, the Personal Profile Concierge, provides mothers with a makeover of their own profile and their child’s online profile and one-on-one attention from someone at the company.

For her son’s profile, Mrs. Weisberg wrote, under the heading Why Is Brad a Great Catch: “Bradley is energetic, motivated, enthusiastic and, if I do say so myself, an attractive young man. He is 5-foot-10 with brown hair and blue eyes. Brad is hardworking and very outgoing. These two characteristics serve him well as he is a Realtor, the co-founder of this Web site, and C.E.O. of BodyShopBids.com, at a venture capitalist firm.”

The site recommends that parents be upfront with their children and inform them of the online searches being conducted on their behalf. There is, naturally, the occasional backlash. “Every once in a while, we’ll have a kid who maybe wasn’t given the full information that they were put up on the Web site,” Mr. Leland said.

Mrs. Weisberg notes that there are obvious limits on how far a parent can and should go in trying to identify a mate for their children. “People have to settle down when they’re ready to.”

TRADITIONAL MATCHMAKING has had some notable drawbacks, said Dwaraka Polepalle, 60, of Queens, who shopped for a husband for his daughter, Lavanya, a former hedge fund manager.

“When you inquire and make calls, sometimes people think you’re asking too much,” said Mr. Polepalle, who said the accepted way for Indian and Indian-American families to achieve this has been to have face-to-face meetings where they discuss the personal details of their children.

Indian families are known to begin the matchmaking process by collecting a prospect’s “bio-data,” which is a résumé of someone’s marital qualifications â€" from the basics like age, weight and height, to information about a prospect’s job and character. There are a number of matrimonial sites that serve to streamline this information-gathering process and curtail the embarrassing and exhausting in-person questioning. Among them are BharatMatrimony.com, Shaadi.com, and SecondShaadi.com (for second marriages).

Mr. Polepalle, a nuclear scientist, turned to Telugumatrimony.com, which is frequented by tech-savvy parents. Having come from a long line of doctors, he set the “are-you-good-enough-for-my-daughter” bar particularly high.

On Telugumatrimony.com, posting and browsing are free, but to reach out and to send and receive e-mails, a subscription starts at $91 for a three-month package that includes 20 prospects, 40 cellphone numbers and 30 text messages.

Lavanya Polepalle and her father wrote her online profile together, but she left the scouting job entirely to him. “If something good comes along, just let me know,” she remembered telling him.

Mr. Polepalle was careful not to forward the profiles of anyone he thought was not his daughter’s equal. He explained that many of the men reaching out were from India and looking for a one-way ticket to America. “They should not become a burden to Lavanya,” said Mr. Polepalle, who rejected many of the suitors. “There should be equal support.”

Eventually, a profile came in that seemed entirely suitable. In the end there was only one candidate that Mr. Polepalle forwarded to his daughter, who is now 31 and known as Mrs. Rayapudi. “Honestly, I did know my husband was ‘the one’ as soon as I saw his picture and then started talking to him,” she said of Dr. Krishna Rayapudi, a 33-year-old gastroenterologist who also had an astrological sign that was an identical match.

Brad Weisberg, who said he is no longer involved in the operation of TheJMom.com, is in a long-term relationship with a woman his mother found for him on the site. “Of course it will be my own decision who I ultimately end up marrying,” he said in an e-mail, “but I value and respect my mother’s suggestions on women I might like to date.”

His mother, naturally, also had some thoughts on this. “If your parent is assertive or too involved in your life, this is not what they should be doing. It’s only if there is respect for the child, and the child doesn’t mind.”

A version of this article appeared in print on May 12, 2013, on page ST13 of the New York edition with the headline: Hey Mom, Call Me When You Find My Wife.