Three years of courtship, ups and downs and frustrations followed by love again… and marriage on the cards! A single click of the mouse had brought together two complete strangers, separated by state boundaries, with different mother tongues and professional pursuits.
I had recently moved to Mumbai as a post-graduate student and was staying in the college hostel. \
In the age of booming social networking sites, I had opted to stay away from them largely to avoid requests for friendship from strangers. How could you be friends with people you’d never met? Then, at the insistence of one of my friends, I had agreed to open an account on a leading social networking site for a week. As I explored, I found a community without realizing that I was entering the most significant moment of my life as well.
As I browsed, I came across the profile of a very attractive young man, Harshal. My mind and maybe my heart too, prompted me to find out more a bout him. I discovered that he did not belong to the same institute… but then what was he doing in this community? If I could foresee the future, I would have got my reply — destiny was in action.
Suddenly I thought, what if this stranger tries to approach me to be a friend? In a panic, I deleted my account. A few days later I got an email from the same stranger! I thought I had been smart by deleting my account, but there were smarter tech savvy people on this planet.
And then we exchanged a few emails. He wanted to find out more about me and I constantly refused to oblige. Then there was a war of logic over the idea of making friends with people you had met before. He was in favor; I was in opposition. In one of his emails he wrote,
‘I don’t mind being friends with online buddies… see actually there is only one difference between the two cases, which is the sequence of events. One is where you know someone in person and then you keep in touch through mail and the other is where you get to know the person through mail and then become good friends.’
He won in the end, and I found my first online friend!
We chatted occasionally with each other amidst our busy days. It did not occur to me that I’d started to enjoy chatting with him. More than that, there were so many similarities between us that each conversation left us more and more amazed and wonderstruck. How could there be someone who was so like me? When he shared his beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes they just echoed all that I stood for. Even smaller things matched — like our sun signs, our parent’s birthdays, our cars, and so on. We seemed to be mirror images of each other.
By now, there was a strong urge to hear each other’s voices. He gave me his cell number. My cautious approach towards strangers stopped me from giving him mine. Finally I called him from a public booth but he could not take my call as he was busy. I came back dejected because it had taken a lot of guts for me to call him and we could not speak.
Then we decided to meet. We fixed up a date and the countdown started. We were both equally nervous and excited at the same time. I had invited him to meet me at my college. I had seen his picture but he had no idea what I looked like. His eyes were searching for me. I found him. He was more perfect than I’d imagined. It was awkward; we didn’t know what to say, what to do, where to go. We were both stealing glances to examine each other more in more depth and detail. We went to a restaurant, where while ordering food, he sneaked glances at me from behind the menu card. I was, for the first time in my life, blushing profusely.
After our meal, we walked for almost four or five hours. Magic was happening. It was the happiest evening of our lives. I could feel some mystical power bringing me close to him; some kind of halo around ourselves. We stood on the side of a busy road and neither the crowd nor the speed of the rushing cars bothered us. We wanted the moment to freeze. I wanted to touch him to check if this was all true. It was romance in all its simplicity! Time flies fastest when it should not. Our first meeting and we did not realize how those eight hours had passed by. He said good-bye and went back. Without admitting anything, we knew we’d promised to hold hands together for life.
From that time we stood by each other in good times and bad, through our joys, sorrows, and struggles. We had to stabilize our careers. My job took me to a different city. The challenges of a long-distance relationship shook us for a while. Life gave us a tough time as well, but we would not quit. Together we overcame.
After all this we were ready to start our new battle — marriage. We knew it would be tough to convince our conservative parents. I come from a small town in Uttar Pradesh and Harshal is from Maharashtra. Heated political issues had arisen between these two states which was enough to complicate our love story.
At our very first meeting, he had said, ‘It will be tough to convince my family; are you ready?’ I had promptly said, ‘Yes’. We were very clear that we would marry only when our parents were fully convinced about us and everyone rejoiced on the wedding day. And we did not want to quite without trying our best. True feelings have real power, and after their initial resistance, our parents gradually recognized the depth of our relationship and true desire to be each other’s companion for life…
That one click changed my life forever.
