There are things you tell yourself when you realize your parents are not in love. Love probably isn’t necessary past a certain age. Maybe the way your mother and father go about their daily routines like professional ice-skaters—a careful distance always held between them—is what real love looks like. Whose parents are really in love, anyway?
Growing up in New Mexico in the 1980s, I took it for granted that my parents’ marriage, which was arranged by their families in India in 1968, would last forever. True, it lacked the palpable electricity I saw between some American couples, but so what? Who said all that hugging and kissing was a good thing? Too many of my friends’ once-affectionate parents were splitting up. My parents, in contrast, were remarkably solid, a well-thought-through match of religion, goals, and socioeconomic standing, clearly in it for the long haul.
“The problem with the Americans is that they get so wrapped up in this who-I-chose business,” my father, a surgeon and regular confidant of the OR nurses, told me when I was thirteen. “They will say, ‘He has changed’ or ‘She isn’t who I married.’ Indians never say that. We have no idea who we married!”
His logic was simple: When you don’t have passionate feelings to glaze over your partner’s flaws in early marriage, you are less likely to be undone by inevitable disappointments later on. True, I’d never seen my parents look dreamily at each other, but I’d also never heard them threaten divorce.
It was a karmic trade-off that I planned to make myself someday. Never mind my habit of falling for brooding musicians. Whenever I imagined the future, I saw myself in a version of my parents’ marriage—tied to someone I loved an acceptable-but-not-overwhelming amount, heat and heartbreak nowhere in sight.
By my mid-20s, I was well on my way, living in New York and dating a very lovely young man. We were kind and careful with each other in a way that felt grown up, if all too familiar. While we were still too young to discuss things like getting married without being tipsy or ironic, it seemed to be the end goal we were moving inevitably toward, like groceries down a conveyor belt. Then I went home to see my parents for a long weekend, and everything changed.
I was 24, and deeply absorbed in my own dramas. I barely noticed how close my mother was sitting to my father at dinner at our favorite restaurant. They watched me with giddy smiles. Poor parents, I thought. So lonely when I’m not here. Then I saw them playing footsie under the table.
That night, after we’d all gone to sleep, I woke up to the sound of them laughing. “You!” my mother squealed. “No, you!” my father insisted. I’d never heard them speak that way to each other in my life. Were they . . . flirting? The next morning, just as I was beginning to think it had all been a strange dream, I walked into the kitchen, and my parents sprang to opposite corners, blushing.
Something was definitely up. I called my brother, Arun, in a panic. Four years older than me and deeply in love with an Indian woman, he was the closest thing we had to a relationship expert in our family. “None of that is happening,” my brother replied calmly from Seattle. “You’ve lost your mind.” His voice was full of the kind of conviction I’d had myself just days before—a certainty about who our parents were and what they were capable of.
“Come home!” I said. “You’ll see!”
Arun was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “Are you sure?” his voice edged with wonder, and we were young suddenly, younger than we had been in years, punted back to a time when our parents were larger than we could imagine, their actions mysteries that could change the course of our entire lives. Forget that we were grown-ups ourselves, that our lives were being lived elsewhere. This felt seismic, a shift so big it threatened to alter the way we looked at everything.
The night before I went back to New York, I came home to a sight so disquieting that I stood outside in the dark for a full five minutes, just watching. It was late. The television was on in our living room. In front of it, my father sat on the couch, my mother cradled in his arms. She was fast asleep, her cheek pressed to his chest.
I went inside. Though I hardly made a sound, my mother woke up. She blinked quietly, than sprang up with the realization that I was there. “I was asleep!” she said, as if I’d accused her of something. Then she got up and took herself to bed, disappearing down the hallway. My father gave me a funny grin and followed her. I stood alone in front of the television clutching my heart, which I suddenly realized was not a mere figure of speech.
Flying back to New York, I could not stop thinking one thing: Why now? Why this sudden attraction to someone who had been there the whole time? Sure, it’s a plot staple in American movies, where clumsy, high-cheekboned beauties regularly realize their “best friend” just happens to be Justin Timberlake, but in real life? In real life, my parents had bypassed that kind of irresistible attraction with almost three decades of houses, children, and pets. In real life, their marriage had proved to be a patchwork of incongruities, the kind that were bound to exist between a cosmopolitan girl from Bombay and a small-town boy from outside Madras.
If on the surface they had been well matched, temperamentally they couldn’t have been more different. My father was mercurial, charming, intuitive, a man who liked to say “I am not sentimental” and then cry during commercials. He moved through the world with open arms, and for good reason: He demanded love and gave it easily.
Not true of my mother. I don’t mean to make her sound cold or cruel. She’s the opposite: bright, engaging, and quick to laugh, a connoisseur of politics and gossip. But she doesn’t tolerate emotional scenes easily. When I was young, her deep reserve left me frustrated, and, as I grew older, occasionally furious. Later, once I realized she couldn’t help it, it just made me sad. I worried for her and for my father, who sometimes seemed to want more of a connection than she could offer.
“Who knows what goes on inside her?” he had said once after a movie left him teary-eyed and her shrugging, and though we all laughed at the time, there was a dart behind his words. My mother kept a wall up that no one could scale.
Until, of course, my father did. Somehow he had made it inside, past my mother’s carefully erected boundaries, past the cool remove, and in response, my mother loved him for it. And now, because of that, I knew what real love looked like. I also knew something else.
You are not in love like that, I thought as the plane touched down at Kennedy airport.
It took me a few months to break up with my boyfriend. I won’t pretend that I handled things between us wisely or well. I could barely put together coherent sentences, much less make sense of the fact that I was acting on a vague hunch that even though we were pretty good together, we weren’t great. It was an uneasy decision, one made more difficult by the fact that when I next visited home six months later, what I saw wasn’t exactly inspiring.
My parents had gotten to the sticky, vulnerable part of being in love. If my earlier visit back had caught them in the first flush of romance, this time I saw them in the middle of an awkward, transitional stage. Gone were the asymmetrical fights of my childhood, the shrugs of indifference, the wide berths, the gliding quietly to other rooms to regroup if anything got too intense.
My parents were now brazenly close. They laughed a lot, but they also fought bitterly, sometimes bringing each other to tears, then promptly fumbling their way back to normal without apology or explanation because neither of them needed to be right as much as they needed to be together. Even mundane activities that were once simple—like going to parties, where they used to arrive in separate cars and leave at different times—became minefields of logistics and expectations. They wrestled over whose car to take, what time to go, how long to stay. It was as if, in deciding to be together, they had turned into one animal with two separate heads, each with distinct ideas about how to move through the world. Watching them became an exercise in worrying.
I couldn’t help thinking that things would end badly. Pessimistic, yes, but when you’ve grown up with the idea that Indian love leads to a rational, calm, reliable marriage and American love leads to a passionate, fragile marriage, then the fact that your Indian parents have fallen in American love is not good. I imagined the worst, thinking I could prepare for it. Maybe someone would cheat, or lie, or double-mortgage the house to pay off a hidden gambling debt. I wasn’t sure exactly how my parents would break each other’s hearts, but I was on the lookout.
And then something happened that made me forget about my parents altogether: I fell in love. It happened quickly and without warning, the way flash floods hit the desert. Jed was a documentary filmmaker, a talker, a guy from back home, as it happened, and a person I could not remain coolly detached from, even though I tried pretty hard those first few months. It was one thing to want what my parents had, and another to actually try to get it. Pretty soon Jed and I started traveling together, then living together, then learning how to do things like run errands and cook meals together. Sometimes at night I would wake up and watch him, equally thrilled and unnerved by how much he was starting to matter to me.
But being close to Jed didn’t come easily. As a person who had long ago decided that sleeping with someone automatically precluded showing them my flaws, I found vulnerability desperately uncomfortable. I’d take any issues or anxieties I had to my brother, or my close friends, or even strangers in bars before I would take them to Jed, something he picked up on quickly.
“Have you ever noticed that you only tell me things once you’ve figured them out with someone else?” he asked one afternoon. “It’s like you only want me to see the cleaned-up version of you.” I smiled and shrugged, a fight-avoidance tactic that had worked well with my previous boyfriend. Jed frowned.
“It’s weird,” he said.
“You don’t get to be everything to me,” I said, escalating the conversation into a fight so quickly that I thought to myself triumphantly that there was nothing for him to do but back down or break up. “Maybe find someone else if that’s the kind of woman you need.”
Before I knew what was happening, we went at it, exaggerating every slight misunderstanding we’d had over the last few months. He said I was pushing him away. I said he was being too possessive. Just as things started to get really heated, Jed stood up and sang, “You’re trying to stop yourself from loving me, but it’s not going to work.”
I stared at him like he had grown gills. He kept singing. He was just a normal guy who wanted normal things, he sang. I was a mostly normal girl who didn’t know how to let things be real.
Was it uncomfortable being sung the subtext of the undoing of every romantic relationship I’d ever been in? Yes. But in that strange way that you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it, I also knew he was giving me what I wanted most—a way to get over myself and start loving big.
Three years into our relationship, Jed went to shoot a film about political dissent in Nigeria. We had made arrangements to talk every couple of days, so I didn’t panic with the first missed phone call, but as three days stretched into four, I went into a sleepless frenzy. I knew there were plenty of reasons this might have happened (bad phone connections, long working hours), but another part of me feared the worst. I wandered through our apartment alone and found things to organize—bathroom drawers, spice cabinets. On the fifth day, I put on the last T-shirt he had worn and lay in bed all day, terrified. When he finally called that night, a short call full of echoes and blips, I started crying. He assured me he was OK, and I assured him I was, too, but afterward, I still couldn’t sleep. There was no undoing this kind of love, I realized, or the complications that came with it. Even after he returned ten days later and I had him right next to me, I remained uneasy. From that moment on, I understood that whatever happened to him would happen to me, too.
Six months later, we got married. By then I knew that committing to each other would not mean that I never felt scared again, or even that I was permanently safe from heartbreak. But it would mean that for as long as we were together, I would be part of something larger than myself. And I felt thankful then—truly thankful that my parents had found each other, and given me a different idea of what marriage could be, after nearly 30 years of living coolly side by side.
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