The characters in this story, Ankit and Maitrayee, are real and I am Maitrayee. We met virtually in a chat room at Rediff.com in 2006, during a random chat. We started chatting every day, and the days turned to weeks which transformed into months and years. In March of 2008, Ankit declared his love and affection for me. I was a good, obedient girl, who did not instantly accept or deny it. I thought to concern my mom regarding this, as she already knew that we were chatting for 2 years and had never met in person.

My mom, being an ideal Indian lady, said that I should accept the proposal as the boy was of the same caste as we were. My opinion was the same and I also loved him. So I said yes and we began dating. However, I had a condition that Ankit would not ask to meet face to face until he officially came to my place with his parents for an official marriage set up. He agreed and our love story began without seeing each other. He occasionally forwarded his photos to me through email and asked for mine.

In November 2011, we decided to disclose our committed relationship with our parents. My mom already knew about this and she was fine with my decision. Her only condition was that if our “Janmakshar” matched, would she will allow us to get married. Janmakshar is a kind of astrological matchmaking in our tradition.

Ankit is an introvert who does not have many friends. When he declared our relationship with his parents, they were shocked. They thought that Ankit might have been trapped by some mysterious girl. So they denied it. Ankit told me about the stressful situation at his place. We were into tears as we thought it would be the end of our relationship. We had previously decided that we would never go against the will of our parents to marry each other.

My Dad was negative about the relationship because he said that Ankit did not have a proper job, which was quite essential. Ankit had an Uncle who lived in Rajkot, the same city where I lived. Ankit lived in Anand city. So Ankit’s Father asked his Uncle to find out about my family background and social status. Uncle misunderstood and wrongly communicated with common friends of my family and his own. A negative comment was passed to Ankit’s Father that the girls in our family were not good and the family was highly sophisticated and arrogant. To make things worse, Ankit firmly said that he would only marry me and no one else. His parents took this in a negative way and told him to see at least 2 or 3 girls and then decide.

Ankit and I never stopped communicating through text messages and chats. Both of us were depressed and did not know what to do next. I came up with a suggestion. I said that we should assume a situation where we are meeting each other and everything is getting fixed. The dialogues will be real, the situations will be real, and we have to see and imagine this in our minds. Like doing a role play. We called this “future dip” where we actually dipped into the future with full emotions and feelings. So that is what we did and we believed that one day we would be ‘one’.

We both loved reading books. During our struggling period, we discovered the book, “Chetan Bhagat” with a part called “The Story Of My Marriage”. We read it and were surprised that the book had the same story that we were living at that time. It had a happy ending, so our belief became stronger.

One fine day I got a call from my maternal Uncle and Aunt. They said that someone named Piyush Vaishnav was inquiring about the details of our family and social background. That was Ankit’s father. He called my Dad and asked him about one of our common relatives. That was the first positive step to our beginning.

On the 16th of October, 2011, he finally came with his family for an official matrimonial purpose. We finally met after so many years of waiting. Finally, on the 29th of November, 2012, we got married and we now have a 6 year old son!

I came across “The Secret” 2 years ago but I never read it. I had a hard copy of the book for a year. During the Covid lockdown, I had a sudden urge to go through the pages of The Secret. As I read it, I realized why and how I was able to get Ankit as my life partner, and I was stunned. Those beautiful 3 words, ask, believe, and receive, changed my life and gifted me with my favorite person.

Thank you, Universe, you mean a lot to me. Thank you!