I have a warm fuzzy feeling in my tummy as I am blogging this. If someone were to ask me what romance is, I would be at a loss for words. Why? Because the usual flowers, cards and gifts, or wine and dine isn't really my idea of romance, but then again I didn't know what ‘my idea’ really was. I had convinced myself that I wasn't a romantic, neither is my husband very big on such things, but I was quite sure that I had romance in my life...just couldn't have put my fingers on it.
Our courtship was literally long bike rides to nowhere! We did not once go to a fancy or even not-so-fancy restaurant in our four month pre-wedding outings. We would eat when we got hungry, just stop wherever we were and eat whatever we got….be it a dhaba, a meal bar…or a smoothie! And because one can hardly talk while riding, we would talk till late in the night. No points for guessing that his first gift to me was a mobile phone! We had eyes and ears for none except each other; we annoyed everyone, and hated it, but couldn't help. We went to the same movie three times without realizing, that is how lost we were! I could forever hum....‘you put me on top of the world’, and his cousins and friends told me his smile saw no end. It was magic, but then courtships are always magic!
But that is not the romance I am talking about. I am talking about a lifestyle. My husband when we first started going out asked me, where I see my life to be 'location wise', and I said, "next to him". When I asked him, he said "Everywhere, I want to show you the world!" And that became our mantra, our plan. It is one thing to have a romantic notion of 'seeing the world' and a completely different thing to have the love and commitment to follow the plan through. This is the kind of plan, where you need to constantly let go of a sense of stability for a life of adventure. We were offered a permanent residency in US thrice and each time, we let go cause we knew, if we stayed, we’d be nesting and throwing our plan out of window. There may be people who are rich enough to settle down and still vacation all over the world, we are not. Our only way was to constantly find jobs in new countries and that entails constantly starting over, accepting positions which pay less. It is freely accepting, that in the end, while your friends might end up in big positions, there is a good chance you might not be sharing those chairs.
We got to build our home, the way we wanted. We actually planned every inch of it, the floor plan, the style, the tiles, the color, the fixtures; everything was built keeping in mind a rustic-cottage vacation we took to Jim Thorpe. We wanted our home to forever remind us of that vacation. Our home isn’t big, people who knew that we were living in US for eight years had expected us to buy one of those big posh dreamy homes! We underwhelmed many, but that home is testament to our marriage as a team. For us, it is perfect!
We traded high salaries, big dreamy homes, and most importantly a sense of stability -- for the romance of adventure! We really don’t know of any other person even in our extended circle of family and friends who saved and then readily spent it all taking a huge risk, willingly go for a job that pays lower than what we initially worked for, or for a job that we could not see as necessarily furthering our career, or an investment in college with no expectations what so ever of job that it may lead to, but each only for its own sake! We have stopped consulting others or even telling them why we are doing what we are doing because it makes no sense to anyone except the two of us, who are living this dream…and yes, it was romance that got us here!
We thank God for that!
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