Married over Skype: proxy weddings are becoming common

"I do" — over video chat

With a red embroidered veil draped over her dark hair, Punam Chowdhury, 21, held her breath as her fiancé said the words that would make them husband and wife. After she echoed them, they were married — and just then, the Internet connection cut out, and the wedding was abruptly over.

The marriage had taken place from opposite ends of the globe over Skype: Chowdhury, an American citizen, sat in a mosque in Jackson Heights, Queens; her new husband, Tanvir Ahmmed, 31, sat in his living room in his native Bangladesh with a Shariah judge. Their courtship, like so many others, had taken place almost entirely online — they had met in person only once, years earlier, in passing. Pretending to feed each other wedding dessert by holding forkfuls of cake to their computer screens, they giggled like any other couple.

An old arrangement, new technology

These are called proxy marriages — a legal arrangement allowing a couple to wed even when one or both spouses are absent. They date back centuries (Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were first married by proxy), and have been used in the US mainly by deployed military members. But they're increasingly common in immigrant communities, where people want to marry partners from their homelands without expensive matchmaking trips abroad.

Technology is driving the growth, says George Andrews of Proxy Marriage Now, a North Carolina company that facilitates such unions for a fee: business has grown 12–15% annually to 400–500 weddings a year, and the non-military share has risen to 40%. Couples often dial into ceremonies in El Salvador, which has relatively little red tape.

The concerns

Convenience has a dark side. Immigration authorities worry proxy marriage will facilitate marriage fraud, and activists warn it can ensnare vulnerable women in trafficking networks. Imam Mohd A. Qayyoom, who runs the New York Qazi Office and officiated Chowdhury's wedding, said he had turned away people seeking to marry cousins abroad to bring them to the US. Community matchmaker Mazeda A. Uddin stopped organizing proxy weddings after watching people get "married and left brokenhearted by unscrupulous foreigners seeking a green card, not a life partner."

Archi Pyati of Sanctuary for Families, which helps battered women, said the center had seen proxy marriages used to marry West African women without their consent — or as children — and to bring women into the country who were then pressed into sex work.

"Part of the reason for having the two people come and appear before a priest or a judge is to make sure it is a freely chosen thing," said Adam Candeub, a Michigan State law professor who has studied proxy marriage. "There are some problems with willy-nilly allowing anyone around the world to marry."

The legal gray zone

Technically, the Chowdhury-Ahmmed marriage "took place" in Bangladesh, where it was legally registered — New York does not permit proxy marriage, and only a few states do (most requiring a military spouse). But the US generally recognizes marriages legally conducted abroad. Notably, while immigration interviews ask for wedding details, officials don't specifically ask whether the ceremony happened by proxy — though admitting it would "quite likely raise a red flag."

The practice also finds support among Islamic scholars: Imam Shamsi Ali of the Jamaica Muslim Center noted that the Koran has long been interpreted to endorse proxy marriage, and "after all these advancements in technology and all kinds of telecommunication tools, scholars came to the conclusion that it is acceptable."

Chowdhury herself saw nothing strange about it — her aunt had married similarly, long before the Internet age: by telephone.

Archive summary, March 2013, based on Anne Barnard's reporting for The New York Times.