I now interrupt storytime for breaking news...

Sorry... I wanted to finish background material before talking in real time, but this was too good to forego...

I just had the most awkward conversation with my dad today. Now, if you don't understand my parents yet, you should now that love/sex/romance topics have always been taboo (unless it's about how bad all of the above are) my whole life. And usually, my phone conversations with my dad are so awkward (I'm not a phone person and we're not a family that's big on sharing life details) that I usually only talk with him for 1-2 minutes, max. Today, we had a 5-6 minute conversation. Whoa. And it was light-hearted... He gave me a lecture, but it wasn't one that made me feel bad, just one that made me try to understand... I think my dad's getting better at approaching me :)

My dad's part of the conversation (I pretty much just assented or went off talking about unimportant topics that I won't bore you with) went like this: Oh, so you're trying to call me more often? Are you really changing your mind about talking to your dad? [this is good for him... too often he's passive aggressive about things and blows up on me at random times and it just makes me not want to talk to him...] Have you changed your mind about Sunday mornings? Will you still be doing homework instead of going to church? I really think you should reconsider that. Your mom and I went through so much trouble to make sure you were raised in a good environment. You can't forget it now that you're an adult. We didn't send you off to babysitters because they could abuse you. We didn't let you go off with stupid boys that would mess up your life. There's a lot of openings for people to abuse you and we made sure that never happened. You do everything in your life to make sure you live a good life--good grades, good social life--everything except God. He will give you a lot of peace, and you need that. Don't forget it. You need to live a good life. It's a treasure in this world. Especially for girls, it's a treasure. And I'm sorry, but that's the way society has set it up, but it's really important for girls to have that treasure. You need to give your husband a treasure, not a messed up life.

And that was pretty much it... OMG MY DAD JUST GAVE ME A TALK ABOUT GIVING MY TREASURE TO MY HUSBAND! I never thought I'd have such an awkward conversation with my dad. I almost burst out laughing when he started talking about it... Wow.

My dad's getting cuter by the minute. How can I hurt such a cute dad by telling him about my boyfriend? I don't like this situation. My dad's just starting to connect with me for the first time in years (we've had a rocky relationship for a while) and now I feel like I'm fucking it all up. Gah. I feel like I have to choose between one or the other. I want to have both my family and my boyfriend. Is that so hard?

Suspicious Parents, Part I

I never thought we would get so serious. I didn't think he would be the one I would have to talk to my parents about.

We said "I love you" to each other about a month after we officially started dating. I knew I was in trouble then. A true cynic, I figured we would fall out of love before we became anything serious. But I fell harder than I thought I ever could. I was so happy and grateful to have found such a wonderful man that I wanted to be a better person. I wanted to go to church more so I could thank God for him. I even wanted to tell my parents about him. Unfortunately for me, a series of events during my first fall with him led me to keep my mouth shut.

The first happened in October. After two months, my parents noticed my phone bill. Being five hours away from your boyfriend is tough--especially when you've just started dating. I called him all the time (still do... I need to!). We kept each other up when we both had all-nighters to do. We called each other when we woke up, when we went to sleep, any time we had a break. I knew this would show up on my cell phone bill, but I hoped that my parents just didn't look at the details (we had unlimited minutes, so I figured they wouldn't have to check).

I underestimated them. One night, during a routine phone call to my mother, she asked me if I were busy with things other than school. My heart skipped a beat as I asked her what she meant. She asked me if I had a boyfriend. She knew his number. She knew his name. She knew that I knew him in high school and what clubs we were in together. I found out later that my parents called Cingular and had them tell them his name. I still don't know how she knew the other stuff about him--she probably looked at my yearbooks. Later that night, I got this email from my father:

Hi,

I tried to reach you today by 11.30pm knowing that you take somebody's phone even at 12.30am 1.30pam and evenat 3.15am. I need to know why you are talking with that boy one to one and a half hour and within few minutes after you hung up the phone he calls you back and spend another one hour talk. If you practise stupid life style you will be a shame to my family and my community. You will be a talking subject in the circle of my acquaintance giving me more shame. Don't tell me lie that it is only a friendship. I know how friends talk in India and America. Tell me who that guy is and his back ground.

Dad

I was terrified. I didn't know what to do. I knew that I was stressed with school and that I was in such an early stage in my relationship that anything could ruin it. So I lied. I called my mother the next day and laughed it off by saying he was just my gay friend who needed counseling and a shoulder to cry on. They bought it.

The next time I went home, two more things happened that made me determine not to tell my parents any time soon. One of my friends at church, a girl I had known since middle school, got found out by her parents. She had been dating a white guy for a long time and her mother finally figured it out. They locked her in the house for days. Then she ran away to her aunt's house and eventually moved in with her boyfriend. It completely shook my parents, especially with my scare in October. I talked to my other friends about it, and talked about my own situation. I told them I was thinking about telling my parents, to which one of my friends said, "Why would you do that? Don't tell them unless you know you're going to marry him. Why ruin your life over something that won't last?" I thought she was wise and kept it a secret.

Furthermore, I had a really tough semester. I dropped Organic Chemistry, got a C in Anatomy and Physiology, barely got a B in Statistics and an A in English (and that's not a big deal since it's always been my easiest subject). For a straight-A pre-med student, that's a big deal. And, I decided not to be pre-med anymore. I felt like it wasn't worth all the effort if I really didn't like it. Granted, my reasoning was also a bit colored by my relationship: I was in that lovey phase where you think about your glorious future together, and I didn't like the prospect of being a busy on-call doctor who never had time for her family. I wanted a family with him (I know, I'm crazy for thinking that far ahead just 3 months into the relationship, but I like to plan ahead! and I was head over heels in love!). So I decided to be a teacher, something my parents don't respect at all. Now if I told them about him, they would think he was the reason for my poor grades and change of heart (which I firmly deny--he was very supportive of me and tried to get me to study, and I'm back to straight A's now because of his prodding... I stupidly planned a difficult semester for myself with my workload and with a new club in which I signed up to be an officer). I couldn't have that. So I kept silent.

As I kept silent and thought about all the reasons they would hate him (he's white, his parents are divorced [meaning divorce is in his genes, obviously], and he's not Christian), I got increasingly angry. I was angry at them for claiming to be Christians while still being so prejudiced. I was angry that I couldn't talk about something so wonderful in my life. I was angry that I had to hide it, that I would even be made to feel guilty about it. My anger and my guilt over lying to my parents came between me and my faith. I had had doubts about it even during high school, when I would read the Bible every night and go to church every Sunday, but this completely severed me from my faith. I couldn't go to church and worship, knowing that I still had a qualm with my parents. There's a verse in the Bible which states that you should not offer sacrifices to God if you have an argument with your brother--you should settle things with your brother, then come to God with a clean heart. I felt like I needed to do that before I could worship again. So I stopped taking communion. I didn't want to take it again until I had told them. And the distance I imposed on myself, the anger and the guilt, made me lose touch and stop caring, stop believing. Should my parents know this, it would be one more reason to hate him, and the one they would have the hardest time coping with.

And that's why I didn't tell them during my first few months with him. Now, I wish I had taken advantage of that October night and told the truth so I could just be rid of a much larger amount of guilt and heartache.

Meeting the boy...

I "met" my boy the summer after my freshman year of college. I say "met" because I had known him in high school, but he was one of those boys that I never associated with: he looked like a slob, he was one of those smart slackers who never reached their full potential, and he was just a general goon. In short, he just wasn't boyfriend, or even friend, material for this overachieving, prejudiced high school student.

Despite being so prejudiced, I had gradually achieved the mentality prescribed by Molly Shannon's character in one of my favorite chick flicks of all time, Serendipity: after a loser buys a casanova candle from her New Age store, she says "That's what happens when people get involved with all that New Age crap--they spend the rest of their lives sitting at home burning candles for Mr. Right when Mr. Good-Enough-For-Right-Now is sitting at the local bar." Although I hadn't gotten to the point of burning casanova candles, I didn't want to be one of those girls who turns down perfectly good guys, hoping that my true prince would come some day. I had to accept that no man is perfect.

So, after my first failed attempt at dating, I became even more cynical than ever concerning love. A frequent blogger, I had just written a post about the non-existence of love when he came back in to my life. I had just started waitressing, and he and his friends came in just as my shift was ending one night. I figured that, since I knew them, I could be extra nice to them and earn a big tip for the night. So, I decided to stay late that day and serve them. How awkward. Me, the big nerd from high school--actually, still a big nerd--trying to flirt and be comfortable with four boys. I fucked up their orders (I had just started working there!) and was pulling at random memories from high school to keep up a conversation. And my efforts were wasted--they didn't bother giving me the complimentary friend-tip. I probably shouldn't have expected as much from college students, especially boys I didn't really know that well.

A few days later, he contacted me on AIM (lame, I know, but understand that you're listening to a nerd's love story). I still didn't know him, so I was just very polite and friendly... and we hit it off. I don't know what it was about him--maybe it was just something as simple as having a boy to talk to--but he had me hooked. In no time, I was looking forward to coming home from work every night at 11, just so I could stay up until 2am IMing him. I don't know what we talked about. Probably stupid shit like who was the best X-Man. I just know that talking to him made me happy.

We kept IMing for most of the summer. When we realized that there was only a month left and that we would both have to go back to school soon (I went to school an hour away from home, he went to school 5 hours away...), we started actually going on "dates," if you can call them that. As I remember them, they went a bit like this:

1. He told me he could tell time by the sun, so he invited me to visit him at work one day just to see his special powers. I found out later that he was lying and that he looked at a clock before coming outside with me. At least he made me a pizza. At least that was real!
2. We had two lunch dates with mutual friends, just to keep it less awkward. I could tell that his friends were giggling in their heads about us on the second "date."
3. He drove me around his elementary school and old neighborhood and ended the date with a Warhead battle. That's right. We ate Warheads to see who could keep a straight face. I wanted to impress him so bad that my tongue was peeling two days later. This was the one time I told my mom I was going out with a boy... She just got passive-aggressive and said, "So, you're hanging out with boys now?"
4. We had a real date the day before he left for school. It was so lame that I brought a book of weird questions just in case we ran out of things to say... I'm sure our waiter thought we were pathetic.

When we left to go to our respective schools, I expected this summer romance to end. But we kept talking. During my first week at school, we stayed up talking on the phone (not online! a big step!) and watching reruns of Fresh Prince until 3 or 4 in the morning... We would both start falling asleep at different times and had to keep each other awake. Toward the end of the week, I finally got the guts to tell him I liked him... and he said he liked me, too. I will always remember August 26, 2006 as day we officially got together.

In the beginning...

Maybe you should understand my parents and my upbringing first before we get to the situation at hand. Like any good Indian parents, mine have always told me that boyfriends, especially non-Indian ones, were strictly off-limits. Just how strict were they about this? Well, you know how every 6-year-old girl thinks she has a boyfriend? Well, one first-grade recess, I got that notion into my head after the boy I had a crush on ran up to me and told me to hide him because some girls were chasing him. That was all... I was in love. I was beaming when my dad picked me up from school. He guessed at things to try to figure out why I was so happy, then asked, "Do you have a boyfriend?" I proudly admitted it, only to be received by a lecture on how boyfriends will ruin my life.

Fast forward to fifth grade. I had formed a crush on a boy at my church. I was sure he was the one for me: he was cute, smart and didn't know I existed. I sang every cheesy love song I could find to him: "Have You Ever" by Brandy, "My Heart Will Go On," and the list goes on. I wrote him Valentine's Day cards professing my love, but which never got sent. I wrote about him profusely in my diary. The diary was where I went wrong. In it I put all my pre-teen hopes of finding my true love, my envy of the first among my friends to get a boyfriend, and my desire to watch Titanic despite the nudity and sex. I hid my diary under my dresser, never knowing that my parents would try to rearrange my room while I was playing with my brother and sister.

All of a sudden, I hear my name called in that ominous dad-voice that tells you you're in trouble. I go to my room and find my parents standing there, holding my little yellow diary. I don't remember exactly what happened afterwards... It's a blur to me now. There was a lot of yelling, a lot of crying, a lot of being chased by my parents throughout the house, a stage where I just went into the living room and sobbed on the couch, a part where my parents cornered me in their bedroom and basically told me I was a horrible person. The next morning, when I got back from school, my mother sat me down and said they got a promotional letter from a local private Christian school. She thought it was a sign from God.

Next thing I know, I'm not joining my friends on their field trips to the middle schools they'll be attending the next year--I'm the loser who stays behind on field trips and sits alone in a classroom all day. I'm taking the entrance exam. I'm buying uniforms. My parents really thought private school was the place for me to straighten out and learn that dating is evil.

After spending three years in private school, my parents (not my school) had truly put the fear of God in me concerning dating. I was a good Indian girl throughout all of high school (I was allowed to go to a public school because I had straightened out so well and because it was getting expensive): I was active in too many clubs to count, I was getting straight-A's, I didn't step out of the lines too much, and, most importantly, I did not date. And, perhaps even as important, my friends did not date. Now, if you look at it outside of an Indian parent's point of view, you could clearly see that my parents were reveling in a loser who had loser friends. We giggled over Orlando Bloom and Heath Ledger, but the thought of ever approaching a living, breathing, heart-throbbing MAN scared the shit out of us. And that's just how my parents wanted it. And that's just what they got. Until I graduated, that is...

I decided to go to a school just an hour away from home--far enough away to where I wouldn't have to live at home and close enough for my parents to let their first-born go. I was a good Indian girl for a good part of the first semester: no drinking, no dancing, no partying, and no boyfriends! But then... peer pressure rolled in. First it was the dancing and the partying, followed shortly by the drinking, followed by the dating. Now, please understand--I was still a loser. My school is one of those fancy little liberal arts schools that's filled with losers. So I fit right in. The partying and the drinking didn't make me any cooler by any means. I dated one boy for about a month--and was horrible at it. I didn't know the first thing about dating (thanks, Mom and Dad) and came out of the "relationship" (?) an even bigger loser. I swore to learn from my mistakes and make the next one a better one. And the next one was him...

Ah, yes... the first post...

I should be working on my senior honors thesis right now, but, as usual, I got distracted and somehow decided to start a blog. I haven't done this in a couple of years, so this page will either end up dying from lack of use because I'm so out of practice, or it will grow and flourish because I've missed blogging so much.

I've been thinking about starting a blog for maybe a month now, just to see check my progress in personal project of mine as well as to share my methods and results (as any good scientist should) with anyone curious enough to google me up. But first, let me give you some background information...

I am an Indian college student, I've been dating a white guy for 2.5 years and my parents still don't know about him. And I'm sick of lying. My goal was to tell them at the end of 2008, but I chickened out. Then my goal was to tell them by the end of January, but I chickened out then. And now my goal is to blurt it out whenever the opportune moment comes, but... chances are I'll probably chicken out again. I'm hoping that, by keeping a blog solely for the purpose of marking my progress, I can remind myself of my failures enough to where I'll make myself do it. And maybe some people will start reading it and hold me accountable... That would be great. Peer pressure really gets me going.

I plan on writing more about myself, my relationship with my boy and my relationship with my parents in upcoming posts, but for now I really need to finish this last section of my thesis so I can send it to my advisors and wash my hands of it!!

I want to keep this anonymous so I can be as open as possible with this blog. I need this as a confessional more than anything, and censoring out of fear would defeat the point.