Coming from an Indian culture, we are very used to staying with our parents until we get married, and sometimes even after that, the parents move in with us. When I graduated high school, I had a choice to move to Norway with my parents or stay in the US for college. The logical and most natural choice was to move with them, but something in me told me I needed to stay in the US.

Good thing I did, because a few months into my first year of college, I met Kyle. He had lived just 15 minutes away from me for over four years, but it took me moving an hour away for us to finally meet. We started dating two weeks after meeting and have been together ever since.

We’ve been through a lot together, and it hasn’t always been easy, but he truly is my person, and we both couldn’t imagine living this life with anyone else. Kyle proposed to me in 2020 on a beach in California. He was there because he was enlisted in the Marines, and it was beautiful.