33 votes. Voting has ended.

 Loading ...

I was halfway through my one year internship with the US Marshals Fugitive Task Force in San Francisco when Jyoti started as a new intern. I was living in San Francisco at the time, but she was living in Gilroy and attending San Jose State. So, whenever I tried to ask her out, she was always too busy with school or had such a long commute home that it never worked out. Also, I had a girlfriend, but things weren’t going well there and I was looking for an excuse to break up with her. I used to tell Jyoti about how things were not going well so that she would get the hint.

On a few occasions, when we went with the Marshals on their early morning raids and got off early, we stopped to see an early afternoon movie before she had to get back home to Gilroy. As she was almost always rejecting my invitations, I thought she had no interest in me. I told my cousin, our boss, about my feelings for her, but thought I would just have to accept that it wasn’t ever going anywhere.

After the internship ended, we remained friends for awhile, catching an afternoon movie every now and then, but nothing more. One day my cousin told Jyoti about the feelings that I had had for her when we were both working there. This was many months later, so Jyoti thought that was probably old news and she thought I probably no longer felt that way. But, I kept driving down to Gilroy to see her, so she finally got a clue. She told me that my cousin had told her about my feelings, but this time I was clueless. I couldn’t imagine why she was telling me this, because all that I remembered was that she had never really seemed to have any time for me.

Eventually, we got on the same page. When I told her I was coming down to see her on February 14, I think she got the message (the flowers I had delivered to her work earlier that day helped). We went out to dinner and afterward took a walk through a nearby park where we finally acknowledged our feelings for each other. When I drove home that night, I went to see my best friend and told him that I was going to marry her. All I had to do now was convince her traditional Indian parents that I was a better choice than sending her to India to find a doctor to marry. Until this point, and several years beyond, I was that “friend” from work that happened to be around a lot. When Jyoti’s mom found our picture from the Marine Corps Ball we had attended together, she figured it out.

All it took was for our families to come together and get to know each other before they realized that I wasn’t what they thought all young American men were like and that nobody else would make their daughter as happy as I could.