JabWeMet: A Chennai Girl, A Punjab Boy & The Cutest Love Story!

A lot of love stories start at family weddings and so did mine. But unlike the other stories, mine was more like a one-sided love affair… Or so I thought. 

It all started at my cousin brother's wedding in Punjab. I, Shreya had flown in all the way from Chennai, my hometown and all my brother’s friends had come in earlier to practice for the sangeet. And one of them happened to be Nikhil, a handsome Punjabi munda who for me, was love at first sight. I just couldn’t stop myself from looking at him! And soon enough I found myself finding ways to befriend him. From chatting up his sister to quietly following him around… Yeah, I did it all. But even after all that effort, we somehow never got talking. The wedding went off well and a week later, I was back in Chennai.   


Once I was back, life resumed as normal but I still found myself thinking about Nikhil sometimes. So, two weeks later I sent him a Facebook friend request. Honestly, it was just a random move without much expectation. But surprisingly, it took him no time at all to accept the request and he even followed it up with a message asking if we’d met at the wedding in Punjab. I was beyond excited! That one message led to many more which led to exchanging of phone numbers, and pretty soon we were whatsapping each other. 

A month into our conversations, I came clean about my feelings. I called him and told him that I liked him. His reply? ‘Oh, I thought you are in love with me!’. But after a brief pause that seemed like an overly stretched minute, he too came out with the truth. Nikhil had been noticing me since the very first day we met at the practice sessions! He admitted to having searched for me on Facebook that very day and had screenshots of my then profile picture on his phone. He even confessed to watching the sangeet dance videos on repeat just so he could look at me. And all this while I felt like I was the one stalking him! 


Nikhil admitted that he was on cloud nine the day he saw my friend request. He had felt the same sort of attraction towards me but never made the first move as he thought that I would judge him or I won’t be interested. Even more surprising was the fact that within 5 days of talking to me, he was sure that I was ‘The One’. And all the time that I was contemplating whether or not to share my feelings, he was already planning our future together! 


A week later he came down to Chennai for 2 days and though I was nervous to meet him, to our surprise the meeting went off pretty well. So, this was our love story - it was an inter-caste setup but luckily for us, no one objected. Nikhil and I tied the knot on the 5th February, 2016, exactly a year after we first met on the same date. 

* As told to Manasvi Jaitly