There's a quiet lie that gets told about marriage — that once the wedding's done and the life is built, the romance settles into something more like logistics. Who's cooking, who's paying, who forgot to call the electrician.
Some of that is true, of course. A lot of marriage is logistics. But somewhere along the way we decided we weren't going to let the admin of a shared life crowd out the reason we built one in the first place.
The small, deliberate things
So we still date each other. Not in a grand, expensive way — we just keep choosing it. A proper dinner with no phones. The long way home because the light is good. A coffee that turns into two hours of talking like we're still figuring each other out. Because in the best way, we always are.
We met as kids, basically. We've watched each other become whole different people since high school. The version of Dikshya I'm married to now isn't the girl from that classroom in Nepal, and I'm not that boy either. Dating each other is how we keep meeting the new versions instead of assuming we already know them.
Falling in love is easy and mostly luck. Staying in love is a decision you make on the ordinary days, over and over, when nothing is forcing you to.
The unglamorous truth
People see the trips and the wedding and the sunsets and assume it's all like that. It isn't. Most of our marriage happens in a normal flat on normal days. The romance isn't in the postcard moments — it's in still reaching for each other in the middle of the boring ones.
That's the part we'd actually want you to take from all this. Not the destinations. The deciding, every day, to keep showing up for the person beside you.
