Love, Unlearned

Falling in love was never in my plan. My plan was simple: stay unmarried, adopt a baby girl at 35, and never owe any man my emotional bandwidth. After seeing the lives my mother, sister, and aunts have lived, I repelled men with romantic intentions as if they were cockroaches. I had made peace with the idea that love wasn't written in my stars. But destiny-apparently bored of my certainty-showed up in the form of Karthik. At first, it was just this crackling tension between us, something neither of us named but both felt in every look, every accidental touch. And then one night, it tipped over-heat winning over hesitation. We got involved before I had the chance to talk myself out of it, before I could put up the fences I'd built my whole life. Somehow, between the laughter, the arguments, and the silences, he started breaking through me-not with grand gestures, but with maddeningly simple things. And now... now I'm in trouble. Because somewhere between resisting him and reaching for him in the dark, I've fallen. But even if I've fallen in love, can I change years of beliefs carved into me by the lives I've watched up close? Can I stop seeing marriage as a cage and love as a trap?