This is a love letter to my husband, followed with a healthy dose of real-world marriage lessons for doe-eyed lovers looking to get settled.
Dear Deep,
Our 16 years together haven’t exactly followed the script we imagined. If our marriage was a road trip, we’d have got lost and argued constantly over the map.
More than once, we thought the worst was behind us, only to face challenges that made our earlier struggles seem almost like a picnic. Through it all, we stayed the course….together.
But standing here today, looking at you, the one person who has witnessed my Olympic-level overthinking, every meltdown, and every questionable decision and still never left my side – I know I’d sign up for this dramedy all over again.
As a couple, we look less like polished silver and more like well-worn boots. We are now weathered, scuffed and proof that we’ve been places. We’ve been through so much muck! And yet my heart is filled with gratitude that even if it sometimes felt like a shitshow, at least we were in it together.
Bad financial decisions, disastrous life decisions, illnesses, depression, getting backstabbed by my family repeatedly – We’ve gone through enough to write a book about. The kind of book people would call over-the-top as a lot of it belies logic and is hard to believe.
But looking back, I realise that every hard season made me love you a little more. From our honeymoon days in Mumbai, to the most dismal period of our marriage in Kolkata, to our most wonderful time in Gurgaon, we’ve already lived a lifetime. In a world of fake promises and double lives, we’ve done a few unholy things ourselves, but we have never stopped loving each other. And perhaps that is the one thing that matters most.
Just look at the happiness we’ve built. We still stay up late talking, laugh at a million inside jokes, and find magic in the most ordinary days. You’re still the person who cracks me up the most, and the one I go to with all my news.
Our marriage is no fairytale. But it’s authentic, hard won and beautiful. 
Love,
Your permanently chatty wife
PS: And please ignore whatever toxic shit I spew when I am tired, overwhelmed, scared, or just being spectacularly unreasonable. The truth is that I will always choose us and this messy and wonderful marriage a million times over.
And now we come to the 6 Lessons Learned from 16 Years of Marriage:
After so many chequered, chaotic, and yet beautiful years of sharing a roof, I feel it is time to gently tap the shoulders of those dreamy-eyed young lovers and tell them that marriage isn’t all rose petals and rainbows. Here are the lessons from my marriage:
Stop letting your parents run the script: I think Indian children are particularly weak in the knees when it comes to our parents. We think that their advice and opinions should be etched in stone. But not all parents are well-intentioned or sensible. I learned that the hard way, falling completely flat on my face after letting dreadfully selfish family advice totally derail our life. Now, at forty, I’ve officially become a hardened player in this game. If my husband and I don’t think a decision is right, it’s a hard no. In fact, these days, if my folks say ABC, I am almost guaranteed to pack my bags and head straight for XYZ.
Survive the same fires everyday without killing each other: You will face frustrations, pettiness, crashouts and messy choices pretty often, even when one of you is barely holding it together. The intent should be to ride it out together instead of turning on each other. The minute you see your other half as a punching bag or a rival, it all starts to go downhill from there. So when you feel like you are unraveling, take some time out to process everything. Even when you are itching for a confrontation, remind yourself that you guys have a common enemy and that two people working together is way better than trying to beat the odds by yourself. 
Humor is better than therapy: Not always but most of the time. Even in the most nightmarish of situations, my husband and I have laughed ourselves silly over something most people would deem unfunny. It’s just who we are- two freaks riding the same bandwagon. And our friends will testify to that.
We are known for our tomfoolery, irreverent quips and gallows humor. And thank goodness, god paired us together, because had one of us lacked the funny bone, this alliance wouldn’t have survived.
Watch your words: When things start going south, it’s tempting to snap. But marriage doesn’t have an undo button. Once hurtful words leave your mouth, they linger like toxic smoke. No amount of frantic backtracking or saying “I didn’t mean it” can swallow them back down.
You aren’t winning an argument; you are bruising the person you love. When tempers rise, breathe, count to ten, and remind yourself what’s at stake. 
Don’t keep score: It is so easy to start a mental spreadsheet of every single thing you do versus what they do. But running a marriage like a corporate audit is a fast track to absolute misery. Nobody’s winning (Monica Bing from Friends would disagree!).
When you treat your relationship like a competitive sport, there’s trouble brewing. The truth is, some weeks you give eighty percent and they give twenty, and other weeks it flips completely. So if most of the time your spouse is doing things right, I suggest you throw away that tally sheet and stop counting the points.
Don’t badmouth your spouse to others, even in jest: Full disclosure: I am 100% guilty of this and probably need to put on a giant hypocrite hat before I keep preaching.
I am a classic oversharer. I can talk my friends’ ears off about the most private stuff. But words have teeth. Even when wrapped up as a joke, broadcasting your partner’s flaws to an audience erodes the sacred, invisible wall of trust between you two. 
The crowd laughs and moves on, but that negative energy sticks around. Like an addict, I am trying to fight that urge, but I do end up slipping sometimes.
A content writer and lifelong book nerd rewriting the rules of her 40s, because in a world that expects women to have it all figured out, the real power belongs to those of us brave enough to tell the truth.