A Tale of Two Weddings (part 1) The Road to Marriage

I first saw my husband in December of 1982, at a Western Campus party.  He was on the dance floor, I can remember him in a turtleneck and a flannel shirt with his hair just overflowing.  I’m not sure why I remembered him, as we were never introduced, but when we met after winter break, playing Risk at a house known for its international parties, I was crushing big time.  Problem was, I was 18 and had just ended my first serious relationship.  I just wanted to have fun, I didn’t want to be serious with anyone.  So I became friends with my crush and dated other guys, for about a month.  One night, after celebrating two friends’ birthdays I planned to take a walk alone around campus and think about my crush, my friends sent Hubby with me for my protection.  We walked around for a while, talking.  I’m not sure why we stopped, I’m not sure how I ended up near the tree.  All I know is one minute we were friends and the next minute my back was against the trunk and we were kissing as if our lives depended upon it.  I tried to continue just dating, but by the end of the month we were exclusive.  Over the next five years, after ups and downs, and even a break up, we decided it was time to get married. 

I come from a typical Midwestern lower middle class family.  My parents were divorced when I was in 4^th grade.  As normally happens, my Mom became head of household and we lived in government subsidized housing.  While my father sent the child support check on time and would spend time with us on holidays, and occasionally in between he really wasn’t a parent you could count on.  My mother worked in retail, she went from a part timer to one of the most respected department managers, in my opinion it was slave labor, but she was always grateful that they hired a high school drop out.  We ate a lot of spaghetti and tuna noodle casserole.  We always had a roof over our heads and enough food to eat, and new clothes at the start of a new school year, but luxuries were few and far between.  Mom worked hard to make her daughters independent women, she had a strong moral code and it was not good to cross her, but her ability to hug  and comfort all the while pushing us to work and study, taught us what unconditional love truly is. 

Hubby is an only child, and being an Indian male that comes with a lot of expectations. He grew up in joint family, due to an unusual set of circumstances he grew up living with not only his parents, his maternal grandparents, maternal aunt, and often another maternal aunt and uncle and his cousins.  Usually a joint family is via the paternal relatives, but that is for another article.  He had attended IIT Delhi, which is a premier engineering college in India.  Afterwards, he applied to MBA programs in the US.  His plan was to get his MBA and return to India and take care of his parents.  It was what was expected and what he believed he should do. 

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry…..is such an apt statement, I had planned to just date and not get serious while getting a college education.  Hubby planned to study, get his degree and go back home.  Neither of us wanted or planned on meeting each other. We never anticipated how meeting would upend both of our worlds. 

It was February, when we first started dating.  For the next 3 months we saw each other every day.  When it came time for me to go home for the summer I told him we should date other people.  I was too young to get this serious with someone.  He had told me that he would be going back to India, after he got his degree.  Each of us tried to keep a buffer between us, so that our hearts wouldn’t be ripped to shreds.  My home was an hour away from the university and for the summer I worked at the local amusement park.  Hubby was staying in the country for the summer for an internship he got through the university.  Fate laughed at our good intentions, his internship was in the marketing department at the same amusement park I was working at.  So after work we would often meet.  Sometimes he would take me home.

Just thinking about those summer days makes me sweat.  My mother did not approve.  Hubby is 4 ½ years older than I am.  I was a naive clueless thing, most of my family thought I lacked common sense.  My older sister’s friend was at another university and she told my mom stories of foreign guys who would get girls to marry them in order to get a green card; then once they got the green card they would divorce the American wife.   These stories made my Mom very wary of Hubby.  Every time he came to the house he was putting his head into the lion’s mouth.  Yet, each time he would come into the house and meet my family and subject himself to being grilled.  His natural reserve and humor slowly grew on my mom and sisters. The extended family took a little longer.  After we had been going out for about a year my Granny asked my Mom, “when was she putting an end to it”, my mom replied “don’t make me choose”.  A year after that Hubby was dropping me off at my grandparents for Thanksgiving.  As I entered the back door, my Mom told me to get Hubby, as Granny had pulled Grandpa into the bathroom and told him, “that it isn’t fair that she can’t bring her young man here, like the other grandchildren do.” As I waved Hubby down before he left, his brown face turned white.  I don’t think he had ever expected to be invited in.  Once again he won over my family.  Not in a big splashy way, just a nice quiet acceptance.  After that he was family. 

Hubby had it harder.  Communication with his family was through long letters that took weeks to reach and an occasional long distance phone call.  He would write to them about everyone at the university.  I was his friend, not girlfriend until the Indian Gossip Network clued them in.  Hubby had ended up at my university because his uncle had taught there and had been able to get him an assistantship.  Initially, when we dated only our close friends knew as Hubby lived alone and he had major issues with PDA.  Later, when he began sharing an apartment with another Indian who happened to be dating an American friend of mine, it was all out in the open.  Their apartment became a hang out for a lot of the Indian grad students, and I just happened to be there most of the time.  Then came the great Diwali face off.  The Indian community held a Diwali pot luck dinner, it was open to everyone on campus.  However, a couple of the grad students said that no foreign girlfriends were allowed as it was unIndian to date.  Hubby and roommate told those guys to “F&*^ off” and took us anyway.  Which meant that now the Indian professors knew we were dating and the professors knew Hubby’s uncle.  Eventually, I got invited to the uncle’s house.  We spent the weekend there and I passed my first family hurdle.  Uncle and Aunt sent good reports back to India.  Problem was Hubby’s parents were in full swing of looking for a bride for him.  They would send pictures of women and their bio datas.  Yes, my boyfriend was receiving resumes of women to take my place. 

As I said earlier, we had been honest with each other from the beginning.  The problem was we were not honest with ourselves.  We each believed we could just be together and have fun and then walk away when the time came.  Hubby received his MBA and decided to teach at the university in order to get his green card.  He wanted work experience in the US.  At one time he was able to go back to India for a few weeks.  He had a lot of thinking to do.  His parents arranged for him to meet several women in the hopes of getting him married.  On paper he was a great catch, IIT, MBA, Green Card, the only thing is, he loved the American girl.  At the end of the trip he told his parents that he couldn’t marry any of the girls he had met.  I on the other hand was at home working at my summer job, wondering if I would get the phone call that he was going to marry someone else.  I had tried to prepare myself for the eventuality, but it seemed surreal.  Eventually he came back and started to teach and we continued to date and live together.

Teaching allowed him to get his green card.  After he got his green card he got a job in the private sector.  While he often had to travel, we were together every weekend.  Although we were very much in love, issues that we had not dealt with began to bubble up.

Hubby was torn.  He wanted to be a proper son and do what his parents wanted.  On the other hand he was in love with me and wanted to marry me.  He had always said he wouldn’t take me to live in India.  As happens when someone is being pulled in two opposite directions, communication between us began to fail, things weren’t right between us.  So I walked away.  I even started seeing someone else.  I didn’t do it to make him choose me.  I did it partly because I couldn’t stand to see him shredded.  He would drink to not think.  I pulled away because of the drinking. I’m not proud that I chose to walk away.  That was a hard time.  It was a painful time.  It’s a time I don’t like to think about.  That time was our crucible.  We came out on the other side a unit. We came out with better communication. We came out knowing we wanted our future to be together.  Now he had to get his parents on board.

After we got back together, it took a little while to get settled.  Then on my birthday, he took me and some friends out to our favorite restaurant.  I looked over at him and knew he was it.  He was my choice.  So I looked over at him and said “will you marry me?”  He took my hand and put it in his pocket, I pulled out a ring box.  He put the ring on my finger and we were engaged. 

A few months later his parents came over to meet me.  The four of us took a trip out to California together.  All of us slept in one hotel room. I shared one of the beds with his mom, he shared the other with his dad.  I was petrified.  The one thing that made it easy was that Hubby, didn’t need or want me to change.  I hope I showed them the respect that I felt, but also I needed them to know the real me.  We also were able to get my immediate family, Mom, Dad, Step-mom, two out of three sisters, to meet with his parents.

When Mummy and Papa returned to India, they still had concerns.  Mummy had brought a ring, but Hubby never told her to give it to me.  He never told her he’d already given me a ring.  So I was not quite officially engaged to him.  However, over the next few months everything got communicated properly.  As he had just started a new job and I was still studying we didn’t want to get into wedding mode.  So we put everything on the back burner for a year.  Once I graduated from the university I officially moved in with him and wedding planning began in earnest.  Only one problem there was no way we could afford to bring all of his family for a US wedding nor could we afford to take all of my family for an Indian wedding.  More importantly, I would not feel truly married unless I had a Christian ceremony and his family wanted to have a Jain ceremony to properly introduce me to the family.  So began the wedding quest.