The ONE

          I am the first person in my closest friend circle to get married. It almost an year now and it feels like Bharath and I got married only yesterday. I remember and enjoyed every single ritual of the wedding. I happily participated in everything even though I was very, very sleepy. Needless to say, it was one of the best days of my life and I will cherish this forever. I am sure you can connect to this if you are already married. As for my unmarried friends, you will definitely feel this on your special day. This post is not about my marriage or the wedding ritual but it is about the random questions that pop in everybody's mind before deciding who is the ONE.

          I was not at all ready to get married when I first spoke to Bharath. In fact we spoke for the first time because he had volunteered to help me come to United States to pursue my masters. We spoke over and over again, we liked each other and here we are today happily married. I never took anybody's advice on what are the qualities that I have to look for in a person before deciding he is the ONE. Neither did I have any list of my own. If I have to put it in words, I would say I felt connected to Bharath on the very first day. And even he proudly says that even he felt connected to me.

          Make a list of your very close friends. Now pick each name individually and try to remember the qualities that you like in that particular person that made you decide he or she can be your friend. I bet you will not find any because you cannot make friends based on your requirements. You just become friends and then you do all that you can to improve and maintain the bond. You will never let that person be angry on you for long, you fight and patch up immediately, you make fun of each other, you share, you care, you express, you listen, you do everything in your power to make each other's journey in life beautiful. For me, this sounds like marriage.

          One of my friends recently asked me "how will I know if a person is the one I can spend the rest of my life with?". To be honest I couldn’t answer that question initially but then I told her to look for a friend in that person and not for a husband. If you can connect with him as a friend, then he can be your life partner. This is a subjective matter but I bet this will be one in the list of many things to look in a partner, if you have many. This was the only criterion in my list and so I could think only of that.

          Marriage is spending each day, year after year with the same person. Marriage is not about finding a perfect life partner.  It is about how both can get accustomed to each other and lead a happy life. It is about finding a person who has same taste as yours, but not to the extent that it makes life boring. It is about finding someone with whom you can be your own self, with whom you can talk anything without having the fear of being judged, with whom you can feel light even with a heavy heart, with whom you can be happy even though you are sad, with whom you can gossip, with whom you can debate over futile topics for hours without effecting your mood, with whom you can grow to be a better person, with whom every single second is a new experience. When you find such ONE, by all means feel you will feel "hawaye chalne lagi hai, slow motion mein dupatta udne laga hai aur aasman mein chaand kuch zyada bada hua hai" *winks*

          Lot of us are widely influenced by the thought, "how can one decide if the he or she is the ONE by talking only for five minutes?" I say the whole idea of falling for someone is merely on how you feel about that person in the first five minutes of the meetings. Rest everything is built around it. As Confucius said, I paraphrase and quote "a journey of lifetime begins with five minutes' ". Considering that we are more than ready to take chances when it comes to the most futile things in life, we have to at least start by giving 'five minutes' when it comes to choosing the ONE.  And in my own experience, five minutes are more than enough to connect with The One. Trust me when I say I took less than that.