SPEAKING.APP

I was twenty-four years old. I had a nice job, nice car, nice hair. Still, my girlfriends didn’t stay for long. Have you ever had problems in your relationships with others? What was wrong with them? Contest chair, ladies and gentlemen, when I was twenty-four, I was living in India, still waiting for Cupid to shoot his arrow and find me the perfect partner. Guess what? It seems Cupid doesn’t live in India. So I went to another angel who had all the answers, my mama. “Mama, I can’t find good girls. How will I ever marry?” She said, “No problem. We can fix it.” Nice mama. Soon, arrangements were made for me to meet the first prospect, Sindhu. There she was. Wow. In a beautiful blue dress, she looked like a star from Bollywood. She looked at me like I was George Clooney. Cupid shot his arrow, and we fell in love. Do you remember a time when you got into a new relationship? What were you expecting? I imagined spending the rest of my life holding her hand, listening to music, and doing hot yoga. A few weeks later, on the Fourth of July, we got married. On America’s Independence Day, I lost my independence. We sailed through our honeymoon, and then differences started to emerge. She liked outdoors, I liked indoors. She loved swimming, I feared drowning. She liked cooking, I liked to tell her how I miss my mama’s cooking. And the real problem was this: I didn’t want to follow her ways, and she wasn’t willing to change. We argued over big things, over small things, even for nothing. I used logic. I used emotion. I even showed her a role model. “Darling, why can’t you just be perfect like me?” Within six months, we grew apart. Under one roof, we were two people living in solitude. No holding hands, no music, only silence. Looking for solutions, I asked my friend Jay. He had just gotten divorced, so clearly he was the expert. Jay said, “Man, life is short. Don’t suffer. Separate!” “No, Jay. I just want to fix it.” “Exactly. My lawyer will fix it.” So I called my mama. The next day, she spoke to both Sindhu and me. She said: “You will never find a partner who is one hundred percent perfect. You fall in love because of Cupid’s arrow, but what keeps you in love is Cupid’s bow. You see, the bow and its string have a great partnership. The more the string pulls back, the more the bow bends. Ego is what pulls the string. Still, the mighty bow bends because it cares for the partner. When she pulls, you bend. When you pull, she bends. If you pull too hard, your relationship will break. If you want to fix it, both of you need to pull less and bend more.” Pull less and bend more. Have you seen anyone who pulls too hard? Have you pulled too hard? Since then, during arguments, I started practicing flexibility. When Sindhu wanted to go out, I joined her. When she wanted to swim, I joined her, at the shallow end. And when I became nice, she became nicer. Soon, she started cooking better than Mama. In my search for the perfect partner, I discovered that perfect partners are the people who keep perfecting their partnerships by choosing to pull less and bend more. Last month, my wife and I celebrated our nineteenth anniversary. Yes, that’s the same wife. Do you think we still argue? Yes. But now, even when we argue, we are still holding hands. And here’s why this matters beyond marriage. You can see problems in any relationship: within families, between friends, between colleagues, between races, cultures, and nations. Today, it seems like our world is breaking apart, doesn’t it? Still, when you look at this room, you see people from one hundred and forty-two different nations sitting together, shoulder to shoulder, and getting along fine. How is that possible? Toastmasters, you are proof that no matter what our differences are, by choosing to pull less and bend more, we can stay together. My mama is no more with us, but her words still ring in our ears: “Pull less and bend more.” Pull less and… bend more.