I work for a PSU bank and I met him in my first branch. We exchanged numbers professionally but eventually, started texting each other personally. Slowly, we became close friends and started dreaming and talking of a life together.

Life felt like a fairy tale then, but I knew that our fairy tale would never have a happy ending because we belonged to different castes. I knew that my family would never marry their daughter to a guy from his caste.

He proposed to me many times, but thinking of the dire consequences, I always pulled myself back and refused him. But as time passed, we didn't even realize how madly we fell in love with each other. We would just spend all our time together. He gave me the best feeling in the world.

But destiny had something else in store for me. His parents fell ill and they started pressurizing him to get married. They introduced him to many girls and forced him to marry someone soon.

On an average he would go and meet at least one girl in a month and I remember feeling miserable - lying down on my bed like a dead body, shaking uncontrollably and dreading the worst.

This continued for a while. He kept rejecting every girl his parents arranged for him to meet. After every rishta meeting, if I asked him about the girl he met and how he liked her, he would only say, "She was nice, but she wasn't you. So, I rejected her."

As the pressure from his parents mounted on him, our love also grew and we couldn't think of a life without each other. At last, we finally decided to talk to our parents about each other. He asked me to talk to my family because they were the ones who would have a caste issue. I had never even thought that I would discuss such a thing with my parents as they had always been very strict in these matters. But l gathered all my courage and spoke directly to my father, who was, in fact, the stricter parent. I think love infuses us with the power to fight the world and face every challenge for the ones we love.

I told my father everything. He listened to my whole story quite carefully and cross-questioned me about everything too, but when I told him about his caste, he just walked out of the room.

After this episode, my parents simply stopped talking to me. When I told my boyfriend about this, he asked me to stop thinking about him and to think about my parents instead.

I tried my best to convince him that we should keep trying for us but he was also being pressurized on his end. More importantly, he didn't want a clash in my home because of him. At last, I asked him to get married to the girl his parents had introduced him to. She was also working in a PSU. I forced him to accept the rishta as I panicked at the thought that he would be left all alone, if my parents married me off first.

It has been about a year since he got married. I am in my thirties right now and I still haven't found another guy like him. I keep searching for him in all the boys I meet. My parents are depressed as they think I've already crossed the right age that a girl should get married in.

Sometimes I feel that even though I sacrificed my love for my parents happiness, they are still not happy.  Might things not have been better if I had married my lover and been settled happily, then?

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