Being a parent on a matrimonial app: a 10-point guide.

You are a parent whose son or daughter has invited you to help on Bhava. You may have used a matrimonial portal in your own time. You may have never used one. Either way, the parents' view on a 2026 app is a new role with new conventions, and this guide is a practical one for navigating it.

Ten points, in rough order of importance.

1. Read the first ten profiles silently.

Before you leave a single note, raise a single concern, or say you like a single candidate — spend the first week observing. Look at how your child's profile presents to candidates. Look at the candidates your child is being matched with. Read the kundali scores. Read the bios. Form a mental model of the space your child is operating in before you contribute.

The most common mistake new family members make is contributing too much, too fast. The role works because of judgment, applied sparingly. Spend the first week building the judgment.

2. Set your relationship label honestly.

The label you choose — Mother, Father, Elder Brother, Maternal Aunt — appears on your child's profile as part of the Family-Active badge. Candidates and their families read this label. It is a small public statement about who is on the matrimonial team.

The honest label is the right one. A brother labelled Father reads as awkward. A maternal aunt labelled Mother misrepresents the role. Pick the relationship that actually describes you.

3. Use “We like them” judiciously.

“We like them” is a soft signal. It tells your child, privately, that you have looked at a candidate and want them to look closer. It is not a vote, it is not a demand, and it is not a marriage proposal.

Save it for candidates whose profiles genuinely catch your eye. If you like every candidate, the signal stops meaning anything. If you like none, your child wonders whether you are actually engaged. One “We like them” per five-to-ten candidates is roughly right.

4. Use “We have a concern” more judiciously still.

“We have a concern” is structured negative feedback. It says: I see this candidate; I have a reason to be wary. It is visible to your child; it is never visible to the candidate.

A useful concern is one your child could not have surfaced on their own. Their family had a falling-out with our family's friends two decades ago. Their gotra is in a complicated relationship to ours. I know the parents from a community context and have reservations. These are the details only you would know, and the product surface for them exists because they are useful.

An unhelpful concern is one that is just preference dressed up as fact. I don't like her hair. He looks too thin. Their family is from a different city. Concerns of this shape damage your standing with your child over time.

5. Write notes the way you would speak to a close family member.

Notes attached to candidate cards are visible to your child, never to the candidate. Write them in your own voice. Be specific. Be concrete. Be brief.

Good: I knew the candidate's grandfather through the temple circle in Chennai. Excellent family.

Less good: Looks promising.

Worse: We should pursue this candidate aggressively given their professional background and family standing.

The third version reads as a CEO's memo, not a parent's note. The first reads as a parent saying something useful.

6. Do not message candidates. Ever.

The conversation between Members happens between Members. Your account does not have a messaging surface to candidates because the product is designed to prevent you from intervening in your child's conversations.

There is a category of family behavior that backfires reliably: the parent who tries to circumvent the no-messaging rule by writing notes-addressed-to-the-candidate inside the notes field. The candidate cannot read those notes. The notes leak to your child as performative-public-positioning. They damage the relationship between parent and child.

Stay out of the chat. Send messages through your child if you want anything communicated.

7. Recognise that you and other family members may disagree.

Your child may have invited more than one of you. You may be one of two parents, or one parent alongside a sibling or another relative. Family members helping the same person will sometimes have different reads on the same candidate.

This is fine. The product is built for it. Your child sees each family member's notes with their name and relationship label, so disagreements are visible and discussable. Your child keeps the final decision.

If you find yourself in active disagreement with another family member on a particular candidate, the right move is usually to let it stand in the notes — your concern, their endorsement, surfaced together — and let your child decide. Pulling your concern because someone else disagreed is self-censorship; insisting your concern overrides theirs is dominance. Neither is the right shape.

8. Suggest candidates from your own networks.

The parents' view has a Suggest someone you know feature. You can bring people from your offline network — friend-of-the-family, friend's daughter, a community-network introduction — into your child's matrimonial introductions.

The mechanics: you enter a phone number or upload a profile PDF. Bhava sends a one-time, consented SMS invitation to the candidate. If the candidate opts in and creates their own Bhava profile, the introduction appears in your child's inbox tagged "From [your name]".

This is one of the most useful things a family member can do. Your offline network is full of compatible candidates the algorithm will never surface. The product surface exists specifically to bring those candidates in.

9. Stay current on your child's preferences.

Your child's partner preferences are visible to you in the parents' view. They may have changed since they last spoke to you about marriage. The candidate they are looking for may not be the candidate you imagine them looking for.

Read the preferences carefully and stay calibrated. A family member who insists on candidates that contradict your child's stated preferences damages everyone's experience.

10. Know when to defer.

The last point, and the most important: the marriage is your child's. The matrimonial process is theirs. You are a curator, in the original sense of the word — a custodian, a guardian, a thoughtful contributor — but you are not the decision-maker.

The role works because the parent who is a great curator is the parent who knows when to weigh in and when to stay quiet. The same applies offline; it just has a clearer product surface here.

A closing note

The matrimonial tradition you grew up in had families participating in matchmaking from the beginning. Bhava's parents' view is the modern product surface for that participation. The mechanics are new; the role is ancient.

Welcome to the parents' view.

— Bhava Notes