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...