SweetRing Survey: 60% Indian Users Accept Inter-religious Dating and Marriage

NEW DELHI, Aug. 31, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- In India, inter-religion marriage has been a delicate topic. In the past, people could not even imagine dating someone outside of their religion. Popular dating App -- SweetRing conducted an online survey, directed to individuals of age 22 to 45, asked them about their views on inter-religious dating and marriages. Out of 1000 respondents with 500 men and 500 women surveyed, 60% of them think that religion doesn't matter. Also, 61% of Indian users are willing to marry someone from a different religion, and 67% of them are ready to go against the will of their parents if their parents won't allow the inter-religious marriage.

For dating, female users are more resistant to date someone from another religion (70%) as compared to male users (41%), who are fairly open to this idea. This could be due to various reasons like fear of unacceptance by the parents and society or even lack of trust in the people from other religion.

Marriage, being the most important decision of life is still made with the consent of parents in India. When the participants were asked about their parents' opinion on inter-religion marriage, 72% female users were confident that their parents would not approve of the same. Whereas, almost half of the male respondents stated that their parents would not mind if they marry someone from a different religion. When they were asked the question: "If your parents won't allow you to get married to someone from a different religion, would you still go ahead and marry that person?", the gender difference still prevailed. On one hand, 67% of the male respondents would marry against the will of their parents, on the other hand, only 45% of women would chose to do so.

It is evident from these statistics that the intention of going against the will of their parents is indeed, is a paradigm shift in the thought process of young Indians, and both male and female respondents agree that it is the lack of the support from family and friends, which makes this decision so challenging to make. Had there been more support from friends and family, more and more people would focus on important factors like compassion and compatibility in a relationship over the religious group they belong to.