This past weekend I got to watch two of my best friends and one of the best couples I know tie the knot. It was a beautiful rooftop ceremony up in Marina Del Rey and a great day spent with friends who came in from all over.
I'll warn you now, that I'm completely unapologetic about how mushy and happy this post is going to be. This is a couple who inspires so much love and it was great to spend a day showering them with it.
In fact, without the groom, Pretesh, I honestly don't know where I'd be today. Though we both went to UConn, Pre and I didn't meet until after college and instantly became friends. The summer that he moved to San Diego he invited me out to visit and that's when I fell head over heels in love with this city. The following summer, in between my first and second year of grad school, he let me crash on his living room floor for two months and then the following summer, I moved from NYC to San Diego and rented out his spare bedroom for my first two years here.
Pre was there for me through all the awkward growing pains of my mid-twenties, from boy drama to post-college poverty and everything in between. The importance of having a best friend like that in your 20s can not be understated: he was often the only voice of logic and honesty in my life and always without judging me. He'd just listen over beers and then tell me what I needed to hear, even if it wasn't always what I wanted to hear.
And the most important thing? Had he not picked that city and then that neighborhood to live in, and had he not rented out his guest room to me and my giant dog, Coal, I would never have met the boy next door, who turned out to be the love of my life. :)
I never doubted that Pre would marry someone as equally warm, level-headed, genuine, outgoing and funny as he is (if not more so) and when I met Anjali for the first time, I knew he'd found her. She fit so seamlessly into our group of friends and it was so easy to talk to her, like someone I'd known forever from the day I met her. As Pre said in his wedding toast (subsequently bringing the house down in tears), how could you not love this girl? She's beautiful, talented, smart and hilarious and one of the most down to earth, laidback people I know.
Their wedding was the most adorable and touching one I've ever been to and I know its just the start of an amazing life for these two. I would wish their relationship on anybody, because if you and your significant other love and respect each other even an ounce as much as these two do, that's about as good as it gets.
