I grew up in a lower-middle-class family, in a suburb of Chicago. When I was 15, I started meditating at the suggestion of a counselor, and soon devoted myself to becoming a yogi. Most kids had posters of sports stars or swimsuit models in their lockers. I had headshots of my Indian guru, Guruji.
When I was 22, I moved into an ashram on the East Coast, where I studied to be a Hindu priest. After I'd been there for a year and a half, I was invited to our center's outpost in Allahabad, India, to take part in an important spiritual festival. Before I left, my mom said, "Be safe and don't come home with a wife." I didn't tell her that, not only was I not planning on coming home with a wife, I wasn't planning on coming home, period.
All I could think was, "What would be the most effective way to kill myself?" For the previous four months, I'd been depressed, sleepless, and anxious. Guruji had made me believe he could get me into medical school, but nothing had panned out. He had also encouraged me to fall in love with a woman at the ashram and then forced me to break up with her. My weight had dropped from my normal 165 lbs. to 127 lbs.
Shortly after we arrived in Allahabad, Guruji said, "Jason, I'm going to be very serious with you. Do you think you are ready to get married?"
"I don't know," I said. "Who do you have in mind for me?"
"It doesn't matter," he said. "If you're not ready to get married then I don't need to tell you who it is, because once I tell her family, it's done."
"When do you want to know by?" I asked.
"Tonight or tomorrow," he said.
For the first time in my life I was making a decision about a woman solely with my brain. The way I saw it, there was no way I could feel any worse than I already did. Every relationship is a risk. Plenty of people date for years, get married, and are divorced before the wedding is paid off.
I could either be paired with an amazing woman and have a happy life, or Guruji could marry me to someone I couldn't stand and I would end up leaving her. That would shame him, and would be the ultimate payback for his emotional and verbal abuse that had brought me to the state I was in. I thought, "F**k it. Let's do it. Who's the lucky girl?"
Janvi was petite and beautiful. If ever there were a woman to fall in love with at first sight, she was it. But I wasn't able to.
"So," I asked her just after we'd met, "do you want to talk up on the rooftop?"
"Okay," she said softly.
She headed up and I went down to get my wool blanket and put on some thick socks. I opened the door and there she was—my bride-to-be, the woman I had daydreamed about since childhood. Her first loving words to me were, "Where you went?!"
For two people about to get married, our conversation was pretty casual. "So what kind of music do you like?" I asked.
"Mainly pop," Janvi said.
"I listen mainly to rock." I tried to impress her a little by adding, "I like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai" (a song from a popular Hindi movie).
I just wasn't "on." Being in a chronic state of high anxiety really doesn't make one very suave. Noticing my lack of personality she said, "I think you're shyer than me. That's supposed to be my job." Ouch.
On the day of our communal wedding, Janvi looked stunning in a red silk sari. I placed a garland of marigolds gently over her head so as not to disturb her outfit, hair, or jewelry. I wasn't sure what to do. "Do I keep holding her hand or do I let go?" I wondered. I looked around and noticed the other couples gazing adoringly into one another's eyes while Janvi and I sat there like two kids playing marriage. We weren't "gaga" like the others.
Since there were five newlywed couples but no private rooms in the building, we were each given a tent for the night. I got my zero-degree sleeping bag and we walked to our marital shantytown. It was freezing and the tent wasn't much of an insulator. I know what you're all thinking—newlyweds have their own way of heating up a tent. But we were still strangers to each other. This was going to take time to develop.
A few nights later, I took a cot mattress up to the rooftop of the ashram. My friend had let us borrow his laptop to watch The Matrix. We cuddled up together with a flask of milk and some KitKat bars I had bought from a vendor on the Ganges. Under the Indian stars, during one of the holiest times, in one of the holiest places, we bonded over chocolate and a sci-fi action movie. I kissed her and she kissed me back.
It's difficult to say exactly when I felt "in love," the feeling didn't come in a mad rush as with other girls. It was more of a slow, steady melding together of hearts. Janvi has the playfulness of a child and the wisdom of a 90-year-old.
It took me a while to break away from Guruji's influence, but when I returned to the U.S. after the wedding, I moved out of the ashram and back to Chicago. Janvi joined me there after her visa cleared.
It wasn't until two years after she came to the U.S. that my defenses lowered and I realized how much I loved and adored her. The interesting part is that it didn't stop there. Every year we're together, I notice that my love is deeper than it was before. And since our twin girls were born two years ago, the emotions have grown exponentially.
After seven years of marriage, that lost and insecure person I was has essentially disappeared. I've slowly developed a great respect for my own decision-making abilities. I still live a spiritual life, but it has become more grounded in the real world.
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