Tasha Dhanraj finds herself finally in love

I think I’ve mentioned my boyfriend enough over the last few months to finally admit that I am in love for the first time. To be honest, considering this is my first boyfriend since I was 14, it’s not so much a glamorous 500 Days Of Summer type affair where I’d been dating people for years, but never truly given them my oh so deep and damaged heart, but rather the first one I could actually stand to be around for more than a few months I inevitably fell in love with. Despite my untortured soul and easy road to romance, I don’t think that it is any less deserving of a Golden Globe.

But it’s true what Michael Ball says. Love changes everything.

I’ve already experienced the first few years of seriously planning and evaluating my life. These are the years that follow directly after a careers counsellor sits you down and asks you what you want to do with your life. Suddenly the statement that ‘I want to be Prime Minister’ becomes less an eventuality and more something that I actually have to plan for. These last few years have involved me planning my life for only myself. Now I am actually involving my boyfriend.

“I’ve been planning my wedding since I was four”

The biggest change in my planning, though, is the planning of my wedding. I’m not going to be cool and say that ‘I don’t want to get married – it merely solidifies the patriarchal tradition of women being men’s property’ and be honest that I’ve been planning my wedding since I was four. But with my cousins all getting married and making grand arrangements that mean something to them as a couple, I suddenly realised that if I got married, I would have to take my boyfriend’s views into consideration as well.

He is on board. That is how my wedding book that I’ve been working on since I was 12 now contains a draft letter that we will send to the Mars company asking if they would lend us a giant M&M costume so we can be married by a clergyman in a red, chocolatey shell.

I imagine the older and wiser readers will be thinking ‘Oh, how innocent and naive, she thinks she’ll marry her first love.’ And while it might be very wishful thinking, I am in love for the first time and right now I am planning for a future that would really make me happy. And that future involves me, him, and a giant M&M.