Chris and Beth’s Wedding

We met at Lothlorien, a 57-person cooperative in Berkeley during college in 1997. For two years, we were each other’s confidants. We took classes together, discussed philosophy until the wee hours of the night, built an art installation, shared bowls of 75-cent rice and teriyaki sauce at Yokohama Station and café mochas at Wall Berlin, and stayed up late into the nights soothing each other’s broken hearts (that is, when we broke up with other people).

We started dating in February 1999. While we both knew that what we had found in each other was magical (everyone could see this in our notorious karaoke renditions of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”), in 2000, we graduated from college and decided to go our separate ways – thinking that we needed to see and experience the world independently. For the next four years, we tried to forget, erase, shorten the distance – through San Francisco, Boston, Paris, Washington DC, and Sri Lanka.

But finally, in October 2004, Beth moved back to San Francisco and we started building a life together. From trekking to social enterprises to learning how to snowboard to learning how to cook to becoming more investment savvy to mastering ping pong to international travel to guilty pleasures of reality dance television shows, we found the complements, similarities and synchronicities in and with each other – and began to embark on creating the kind of life together that we both aspired to live.

Which brought us to Mumbai, India in September 2006. This was the experience that solidified our future together. Nearly five months after we arrived – nearly eight years after the saga began – Chris asked Beth to marry him. And with a ring that Chris found at a Mumbai street stall around the corner from our flat – with this ring that he bargained down to a mere 20 rupees (50 cents) – Beth said “yes.”