Saleem and Aneesha S. Sharma (@Fangs_Shui & @RollMe_one)
Aneesha did not think that a simple ‘Hi’ on direct message to Saleem, on Twitter, would lead to a whirlwind romance that culminated in their marriage two years later. “I got an immediate response from Saleem and after three days of conversation, we exchanged numbers,” Aneesha gushes.
For someone brought up in a fairly strict Malayali family and living in Dubai for 15 years, Aneesha, a former employee of Dubai International Airport, found it rather difficult to even get permission to visit India. But a friend’s marriage in 2012 made meeting Saleem a possibility, after six months of only conversing over the phone.
“When Aneesha finally landed in India, I was at the airport to receive her with a bouquet and a placard with her name. I felt like one of those drivers at the airport one sees in a Bollywood movie,” Saleem laughs.
Saleem, a 30-year-old senior account manager of social media at Interactive Avenues, who tweets couplets regularly, says that in about two years of courtship they only met for 32 days, every five to six months.
“The first time we met each other there was 15 seconds of silence after we hugged; we were both equally nervous,” he says.
From conversing online to graduating to phone calls and finally meeting in person, one would expect their online persona to be different from the real one. However, both Saleem and Aneesha vehemently deny that. “I’ve met almost 200-250 people from Twitter and 80 per cent of them are different from what they appear online. But with Aneesha that wasn’t the case; she turned out to be the same person,” Saleem says. Aneesha also responds in quite the same way, “Saleem is who he was on Twitter and he is still the same.”
While Saleem thinks Twitter allows people “to get to know the other person over a period through his or her tweets,” Aneesha doesn’t really think meeting people via Twitter is a good idea.
Online dating might come across as a shaky start for some, especially for concerned parents. Although the couple’s parents were unaware of how exactly they met, when it was finally disclosed, they took it sportingly. “The same fact was reiterated at our sangeet ceremony when our friends put up a skit of how we met,” Saleem says.
Their wedding even had hashtags true to Twitter-style called #TwitterWaliShaadi and #PatialaPegWedding.
Even after six months of marriage, the couple’s interaction on Twitter has been the same. But did they ever imagine marrying someone they met online? Aneesha exclaims, “Never. I thought I’d have one of those typical arranged Indian weddings. Even today I still look at him and ask ‘did this really happen?’”
Mihir Bijur and Sulbha Arora (@MihirBijur & @SulbhaArora)
Sulbha Arora’s “random tweet at 3 a.m.”, asking “who all are awake”, evoked a response from her now-husband Mihir Bijur, a 33-year-old marketing professional. However, significant interaction started only a few days later when Mihir tweeted about a Simon and Garfunkel song to which Sulbha replied saying it was her favourite. And that instantly connected them.
“We met at Salt Water Café in Mumbai, in 2010, three months after our first Twitter interaction,” Sulbha, a 37-year-old gynaecologist & consultant fertility specialist, reminisces. “Our online chemistry was so strong that by then, meeting offline seemed the natural thing to do. I had been looking forward to it for three months and finally the time was here,” Mihir continues.
Was nervousness a part of the meeting as well? Sulbha says that she was already in love long before they met in person and that she became jittery only five minutes before Mihir reached the venue. “I was really excited,” she says. Four days after they met, Mihir proposed to Sulbha at Salt Water Cafe and almost a year later on July 22, 2011, the couple got married. While Mihir’s family was a little surprised about the way they met, Sulbha’s parents were very encouraging. “They were keen to meet him and his family,” she says.
Mihir and Sulbha say that the online flirting has stopped and so have the fights (“Thank heavens,” Sulbha exclaims) but she still enjoys reading his tweets, although they hardly interact on Twitter anymore.
Did they ever look back and wonder if they’d marry someone they met online, especially Twitter, where the factor of anonymity is higher? “No, not really,” Sulbha says and adds that, “It's great that two people get to know each other, connect, develop a great chemistry and then meet in person.” Sulbha adds that friends were sceptical and told her to be careful, “I guess it’s not everyday that you fall in love with someone you have never met. I still cannot believe I did,” she says.
