II. Candid Verses: Explicit Relationship, Implicit Rules!

It almost started out like a fairytale. I was awestruck by her paintings and she fell for my cheesy jokes. Her unusual quantitative reasoning, my mundane qualitative potential; her short but short-lived temper, my perennial but even-tempered mood; her penchant for peeling potatoes, my eagerness to be a couch potato – we complemented each other!

More importantly, she was comfortable with my flaws, and I was comfortable with her living distance: driving distance! Then Cupid got jealous.

Initially, I felt like a fortunate victim of being laid off. I took this as a break from unsatisfying work, as “ a time to reinvent myself”. I planned to room with my old buddies, do some soul-searching about career, read books, drink beers, and just take it easy for a while. She opposed sternly and within a week, I moved to her place.

People say you learn a lot about your spouse when you begin to live together. They don’t tell you necessarily that you actually learn a lot more about yourself. I realized that the daily sightings of dustless floors, spotless sinks, and creaseless sheets left me nauseated. I began to notice how her achievements, paintings, cards and even her childhood dolls are displayed ostentatiously all over the apartment. While my not so glitzy collection of beer mugs, sports and rock posters, and favorite DVDs and CDs are either neatly put away in the drawers and shelves, hidden under the table, or buried in the basement. She had deemed this to be "OUR" apartment. I’m not complaining!

It is also funny how her mood swings coincides exactly with the most important NBA playoff game in the evening and how her school projects conclude just before the Sunday night football. And this is the only time she feels we ought to be doing something together. What about my friends? Sooner than latter, they become distant memories of the past, because I am told that I have supposedly also found a best friend. So have my friends!

I remember my seniors in their drunken stupor often saying with both regret and arrogance “Son this is relationship. You need to sacrifice a lot.”

So, one weekend morning I woke up before her and surprised her by making her favorite  tea. Unfortunately, I forgot to minimize the window before I realized that she sat down and got to browsing. Her short fuse blew up and motioned in one breath “TEST CRICKET OF ALL THINGS IN THE MORNING? WHAT ABOUT A JOB?” (What can I say? I am a purist when it comes to sports).

I calmed her down like always and explained that I was still soul-searching for an ideal career and test cricket helped me to meditate in the morning. I began to turn red. You see, I am a really bad liar. She woke up, marched to her room, and slammed the door shut managing to blurt out “Perhaps your cricket can also give you a job and make you a lunch for today. I have tons of work to do.”

This did not bode well. A haunting silence ensued for the next few hours until my grumbling stomach broke the accord. I wandered restlessly trying to come up with the words to appease her and my empty stomach. As soon as I made out that she’d gone to the bathroom, I went to her room and began to rehearse the stellar apology I had written in my mind.  Then I caught a muffled sound of laughter coming from her Macbook. I double clicked on the minimized window. When she returned, I cranked up the volume and blurted out with a pretentious authority “COFFEE WITH KARAN OF ALL THINGS?  THAT MUST BE TONS OF WORK!”

She turned pale at first, and then progressively red and finally we both ended the fiasco with a boisterous laughter. We may not complement each other at all as we had perceived, but we had a very important thing in common: We are both bad liars and bad liars keep relationship honest. Soon, she asked what I wanted to eat for lunch and asked me to go finish my cricket. This was like a wife begging her husband to go to a strip club. But there was a catch. There always is.

She proposed that we could go to a mall after lunch and stop by borders later, which was just enough to ruin my Sunday Afternoon Football plans. As they say a man has his will and a woman has her way. This perhaps is the only rule in any given relationship to go by. In retrospect, it almost did end like a fairytale!

I. Candid Verses: Not-So-Cute Babies! 
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