When it was time for Sabiha Ansari to get married, her parents flew her to India. She met her husband-to-be for less than 20 minutes, with family, then was asked whether she liked him.
“That was really hard for me,” she says. “I kind of wanted to have some time alone with him to talk to him, or even on the phone.”
But she said yes, and they were married five days later. That was in 1991.
Things were different for Sabiha’s younger sister, Huma Ansari, in 2005.
“Sometimes it feels weird for me to even call it an arranged marriage because I feel like I got to know my husband pretty well,” says the 27-year-old Richmond, Virginia, optometrist.
She and her husband, Saud Rahman, 29, a medical resident, were introduced through family friends at a casual dinner, then e-mailed and called each other for several months. They married a year later.