urinder Bhardwaj remembers when he first saw the woman who would become his wife of 39 years.

"All I had seen was a picture of hers," says Bhardwaj, a professor in the geography department specializing in Indian studies.

Two professors who were friends of his family set them up - in a way. The friends talked to both families about compatibility issues, and after about a year of discussion, the decision to marry was made. It was a little like a blind date, except the couple never actually dated or even physically saw each other.

His wife, Vinay Bhardwaj, says she didn't even see her husband's photo.

"I wasn't involved at all," she says, adding she didn't mind because she had confidence in her parents' choice.

"Anyone could have come in and said he was my husband, and I would have believed them."

That's a far cry from the typical American ideal of boy meets girl, boy woos girl, then they fall in love and live happily ever after. For many Indians and Pakistanis, arranged marriages are often the cultural norm even though there are no statistics to show their prevalence.

reekala Bhagwat, a graduate student studying international marketing, says while she had a love marriage, arranged marriages are important to the majority of Indians.

"In our society, the trend of arranged marriage will never change for another 50 years," Bhagwat says. "Only in the urban areas because of their cosmopolitan nature are things changing but at a very negligible rate. Maybe 2 percent of Indians have love marriages today."

Bhardwaj says arranged marriages became widespread mostly because of their practical merits.

"Arranged marriages in India as well as in Pakistan, of course, have been going on for a long, long period of time, but it has been only one of the ways of marriages," he says. "The predominant one, of course, has been arranged marriages. The philosophy behind that was since marriages occurred at a relatively early age, the two persons might not even know what to do. In other words, elders were the ones who could make better decisions." Fifty to 100 years ago, he explains, the age of marriage might have been in the prepubescent range in certain castes and areas. But that rarely happens today, he says. More likely, people may marry from age 15 and up, depending on their background and region.

But Bhardwaj cautioned immediately that arranged marriage does not mean forced marriage. Instead, it means taking into account the opinions of the entire family before marriage.

"More important was the fact that marriages were always between families," he says. "Although two persons got married, it really meant that two families got together. The decision to get married was a much bigger one than just two individuals."

Bhardwaj says arranged marriages are often popular among these cultures because of their emphasis on family as opposed to the American ideal of rugged individualism.

This temple, dedicated to the many gods of Hinduism, stands in the Bhardwajs' living room and is the focus of many daily prayers.

"I remember one of the gentlemen asking me (for my opinion), and my reply basically was, 'You're wiser. You know better. If you know both the families, then you know whether we'll be able to get along well or not, and that's the most important thing in my life,'" Bhardwaj says.