August 06, 2021
As part of its continuing and often desperate effort to promote marriage and a larger population, the Islamic Republic has just unveiled an official dating app to try to get more Iranian young people to marry early.
The goal is to reverse the rising divorce rate and falling birth rate, which, if unchecked, will result in Iran’s population declining within a few decades.
The new app, dubbed Hamdan (Companion), was developed by a group affiliated with the Islamic Propaganda Organization, a state organization dedicated to boosting what its views as Islamic values.
The new app claims to use artificial intelligence to find matches “only for bachelors seeking permanent marriage” and just one wife. It doesn’t explain why it does not support marriage to a second woman.
The app is not available to women; it is only open to males.
Dating apps are understood to be popular in Iran, but from now on only Hamdan will be legal.
According to Hamdan’s website, users will have to verify their identity and undergo a psychological test before they start searching for a partner. When a match is found, the app “introduces the families together with the presence of service consultants,” who will “accompany” the couple for four years after their marriage. This would appear to limit the role of the parents in arranging marriages and bring the state into play.
The head of the Tebyan Cultural Institute, which developed Hamdan, said the app would create healthy families at a time when family values are under threat by the “devil” and Iran’s enemies.
According to statistics from the National Organization for Civil Registration, some 307,300 marriages and 99,600 divorces were recorded in Iran between March and December 2020, or almost one divorce for every three marriages. In 2008, there was one divorce for every eight marriages.
Iran had what was rated by the UN as one of the most successful family planning programs in the 1990s, when the regime wanted to stop the huge baby boom that was overwhelming the country. But a decade ago, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi killed all those programs by fiat and decreed that Iran’s population should double to150 million so the country would have more global power.
His campaign has been a failure and young people continue to delay marriage until their late 20s and to have fewer children in fact, too few to replace themselves and allow the population to grow. Most analyses conclude that financial pressures such as the high cost of housing are the main reasons young people postpone marriage and have fewer offspring.
More than half of Iran’s population is under the age of 35. But the government has warned that, if no action is taken, it could become one of the world’s oldest countries in the next three decades.
In March, the Majlis passed a bill mandating the government to offer financial incentives for marriage and for couples to have more than two children.
