What are your middle names?
Prior to getting married my middle name was Noelle, which is a lovely and unique name. When I married Aditya I moved my short, Germanic last name into the middle name spot, dropped Noelle, and added Aditya’s nine letters long last name. NINE! I rather miss Noelle, but the tradeoff is that I now get to confuse the heck out of people when they read my nametag or work badge. Aditya doesn’t have a middle name because he’s a heathen Indian. Sometimes this causes him to cry himself to sleep at night.

How long have you been together?
We’ve been married for a little over two years, and together for five as of last Saturday. The picture above is of our honeymoon after the American wedding. We went camping on the Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara in California.

How long did you know each other before you started dating?
Depending on how you define “know”, either six months or a few weeks. See (some of) the story here.

Who asked whom out?
Well now. He invited me to dinner and a movie at his place – sausage pizza, rum & coke, and Fight Club. On Valentine’s Day. At the time we were just friends, and he phrased it very sneakily so that I couldn’t be sure it was a date or not. Plus, you know, who watches Fight Club on their first date? (Aditya & I, apparently.) His strategy of date-asking is known as “plausible deniability”, and is a dastardly way of avoiding rejection when you ask someone out. And I wasn’t the first girl taken in by it, I hear…

How old are each of you?
We’re both in our mid-twenties.

Whose siblings do you see the most?
His, actually. We’re both the babies of our families – I have an older brother and he has an older brother & sister. Both of the brothers live in the Bay Area, so when we see one, we inevitably see the other. However, his sister lives in Bombay, so when we make our biennial trip to India we see her too. Good thing his siblings are cool people (and they have children we get to spoil!).

Which situation is the hardest on you as a couple?
Work-life balance, without a doubt. We’re both in the “building one’s career” stage of life, so we’re occasionally often working long hours. And then we get home, and find that, once again, the dogs failed to cook us dinner and clean the house. Fracking freeloaders.

Did you go to the same school?
We both went to the same small, liberal arts college in rural Indiana, which meant that a significant portion of our time dating was spent wandering the aisles of Super Walmart. He graduated the year before I did, and promptly fled to Silicon Valley, abandoning me among the cornfields.

Are you from the same home town?
Hahahahahaha. No.

Who is smarter?
Well… Someone in our partnership has a graduate degree, and someone doesn’t. Someone also scored a whole eighty points more on the SAT than someone else. I’m not naming any names here, but someone should be ashamed of being beaten out on the math section of the SAT by an AMERICAN GIRL. Ahem.

Who is the most sensitive?
I so totally have a higher pain threshold than Aditya. This mostly means I fall down a lot, since motor skills weren’t a high priority growing up. He whines every time he comes home from cricket practice after being hit by the ball – and he plays in a tennis ball league. (Yes, I know this is probably not what the question meant – but, c’mon, I don’t want to embarrass the poor boy too much now, do I?)

Where do you eat out most as a couple?
If by “eat out” you don’t mean “make a midnight run to Taco Bell to relive our days of youth”, the answer would probably be the sushi place down the highway. Their rainbow mountain and “she’s so hot” rolls are some of the best I’ve ever had – even Aditya’s parents liked them, despite the whole “raw fish” thing. Sidenote: every Indian I have introduced to sushi thought I was joking when I told them we’d be eating raw fish. And when I warned them about wasabi. Oh, the looks on their faces…

Where is the furthest you two have traveled together as a couple?
India. Or Indiana. It all depends on your frame of reference.

Who has the craziest exes?
This one goes to Aditya. He dated lots of girls his freshman year of college. (Insert bad joke here about American women falling for exotic foreign dudes.) While I haven’t met all of them, the statistics are completely on my side – I wasn’t nearly as active on the dating scene.

Who has the worst temper?
Eh, our tempers aren’t really comparable. He’s more of the flash fire type, while I can keep angry little embers burning in my blackened heart for quite some time.

Who does the cooking?
Me. Aditya can cook chicken, reheat pre-made food, prepare Maggie, and is the master of all things barbeque. When we don’t eat out, evenings go something like this:

Aditya, after looking through pantry and fridge: “There’s no food in the house, and I’m pretty certain it was your turn to go to the grocery store this weekend.”
Me: “Are you on crack? We could eat for a month on what’s in the fridge without even touching the emergency TastyBite rations.”
Aditya: “You’re just trying to weasel out of taking responsibility for not going to the grocery store earlier. You can’t fool me. Or the dogs. Look at the dogs staring at you – they can smell your guilt.”
Me: “They’re only paying attention because we’re in the kitchen. The kitchen which contains food. Look, I’ll show you – I’ll have an awesome stir fry done in thirty minutes.”
*30 minutes pass and dinner is served*
Me: “Wait a moment…”
Aditya: “Thanks for the delicious meal, my lovely tubelight. Took you long enough to light up on that one.”

Who is the neat-freak?
Our basement tenant. We’re pigs. Seriously.

Who is more stubborn?
I’ll admit to being this person.

Who hogs the bed?
Kajol and Panda, when they think it’s close enough to morning that they’ll be able to pretend they’re waking us up, rather than trying to steal a nap on the forbidden bed.

Who wakes up earlier?
Aditya is out of bed earlier 90% of the time, but when I need to get up super-early I have an easier time doing it than he does.

Where was your first date?
The “bum room” of Aditya’s frat, where we watched Fight Club on a couch older than either of us. Good times.

Who is more jealous?
Aditya’s fifth nickname for Kajol is “jealous cat” (cat being a pejorative term in his messed-up brain) because she always wants attention whenever Panda gets attention from me. Of course, Aditya always wants attention whenever anyone is getting attention from me.

How long did it take to get serious?
I was the first girl in college to last more than a fortnight – on the fifteenth day Aditya realized this, had a mini-crisis about the “seriousness” of our relationship, then calmed down when I smacked him on the head.

Who eats more?
Aditya has a far faster metabolism than me, so I think he ends up eating more, but he sure eats it slowly. The speed at which he eats is a running family joke.

Who does the laundry?
We both do. I separate the laundry, tell him which pile he is allowed to wash, he does those loads and I do the delicates & hand wash. I fold and he unorphans socks from our singleton box. It’s all very modern and egalitarian and shit.

Who’s better with the computer?
I am master of the interwebs with a blackbelt in googlefu, and Aditya is charge of the little things like software and hardware.

Who drives when you are together?
Adtiya, mostly, because he cares more than I do about the perfect way to zig-zag in traffic. I find this is a good rule in a relationship: the one who cares more about a little thing takes care of it.