I’ve mentioned in an earlier post about my biggest concern about hitting on Pinky – I always thought she was “too young”. Coming to think of it now, what I didn’t realise back then was that marrying someone much younger can actually help give you a “second youth”. In other words, Pinky makes me feel much younger!
It’s possibly because of the way it started. Pinky pinged me on Orkut with a link to her blog. She was barely nineteen then, and her posts back then looked like what a teenager would write. Bad spellings. Horrible capitalisation. Trying to sound cutesy. She even spelled her name as “Preanca”!
It was over a year later that we started talking regularly, but the image had been fixed – this was one cute kid who liked to chat to me, and I treated her thus. We used to speak about just about anything, from hugging techniques to bra fits (that one slightly creeped her out, I think).
When I entered the arranged marriage market, she became my go to person for discussing what was happening in the market. She loved it as well (showing early signs of becoming a Marriage Broker Auntie), and told me I was giving her the kind of insight her older cousins who had gone through the market had denied her.
At one point of time, she asked me if she could think of me as a “brother who is getting married” which kinda creeped me out, and I’d blown my top. Soon after she gave me my first cutesy nickname (and she continues to come up with new names every one month or so).
The net result of all this was that while she was 22, and employed, when I first met her, I still thought of her as a “cute kid”. I’d assigned to her the voice of a little girl, which is why I got positively surprised when I first spoke to her on the phone. And when I met her, I realised she was mature beyond her years, and it was an easy decision then to start hitting on her.
Soon after, though, I realised the joys of being with someone so young, one who hadn’t yet been through a quarter life crisis (though I had to live through yet another quarter life crisis when she inevitably went through one). Her thoughts were fresh, and unharmed by the harsh experiences of life. That made her positive, and fun-loving, and hanging out with her became a lot of fun.
She had habits and hobbies one would expect of someone in their early twenties, and I quite enjoyed partaking in them and feeling young again (though one activity she’s consistently refused to share with me is partying!). And of course, I also later realised that marrying a young woman meant that I could put off making babies to a bit later, and we had Berry when we thought we should have a kid, rather than getting spooked by a biological clock.
I still find Pinky cute. There are times when she makes that cute face that reminds me of the cute kid who I didn’t want to hit on! And she finds random things funny and laughs in a girlish manner, and reminds me once again of that “kid” I met in Gandhi Bazaar back in 2009!
I’m suddenly reminded of the day in March 2015 when we were walking down the middle of Avinguda Josep Taradellas in Barcelona, and we suddenly held hands and spontaneously start running. That’s the kind of stuff that keeps me young, though my hair and waistline sometimes try to tell me otherwise!
PS: when I met her, I was 26 and she was 22. So we’ve never come close to violating the “N/2 + 7 rule“.