Can one person become your entire world? A messy, real, un-Bollywood romance

By Shiwani Dhiman

Novels, movies, and social media often portray weddings as the happy ending to a love story. “Ek insaan bhi puri duniya ho sakta hai (one person can be an entire world)” goes the quintessential Bollywood dialogue. A couple gets married, starts a life together, and love is supposed to get them through everything that happens next.

But life after the wedding is rarely that simple.

In 2025, researchers found that different types of intimacy can influence marital satisfaction, even in the first three years of a relationship. And that made me think about how the closeness of two people can continue to increase after marriage.

I did not understand this when I married Arjun in December 2023. Honestly, I think it took us more than two and a half years to feel real love between us, even after having a love marriage.

Not the love people show in wedding photographs or the romantic movie kind of love, where background music plays, and two people understand each other without saying anything.

I mean real love. The kind of love where you begin to know a person as they are, not only as you imagined them before marriage. Where you see their difficult side, and they see yours, and slowly you learn how to live with those parts too.

The kind that comes after ordinary days. After fights. After homesickness. After ego. After saying the off-beam thing and then feeling bad about it. After wondering quietly, “Did we make the right decision?”

Real love, for me, came when we stopped expecting each other to be perfect and started trying to understand why we were hurting each other.

We were ordinary people and still are. We met during a fellowship in India. Both of us were trying to do something better with our careers. We came from very different worlds where there was no old family connection, no childhood friendship, no familiar bridge between us. Even our homes in India are almost 1700 kilometres apart.

It started in a very small way. At the end of the fellowship induction programme, I gave Arjun a plant leaf as a gift. I just wanted to thank him for the induction. It was not romantic or dramatic. Maybe anyone else would have forgotten about it.

But somehow, from that leaf onward, something began. We exchanged phone numbers, and slowly, a long-distance relationship started. For two and a half years, we loved each other over calls, messages, waiting, explaining, misunderstanding, patching up again – this became our rhythm.

Like many people in love, we thought marriage would solve everything. We thought that once we were together under one roof, life would become easier. But we had to convince our families.

Anyone from India will understand this: love is never only between two people. It passes through families, traditions, fears, society, caste, class, region, language, reputation, and many other things that people do not always say openly.

Slowly, after many questions and many conversations, we got married on 12 December 2023. On our first night after marriage, we sat together and high-fived each other.

We won, we said. And yes, maybe we had won. But now I know we had only won the first round. Three months later, we moved to the Netherlands. That is when the real test of marriage began.

In India, we had fought for our love. In the Netherlands, we had to learn how to live inside that love. A new country was about to change us. Small things became very heavy, like groceries, food, weather, language, documents, loneliness, homesickness, money, work, studies, cooking, cleaning, public transport… Everything slowly entered the marriage.

Love was no longer only late-night calls and sweet messages. It started becoming challenging day after day.

And honestly, we fought.

Over small things. Over big ones. We hurt each other without always meaning to. Our food tastes, habits and family cultures are different. Our belief systems are different. Even our love language is different.

In the beginning, his questions felt like hatred to me. My questions felt like criticism to him. We did not always hear concern. We heard an attack. We did not always see fear. We saw ego. We did not understand that sometimes behind anger, there is pain asking to be seen.

There were days when we did not want to see each other’s faces. There were days when we wondered why we got married. There were days when the future of the marriage felt frighteningly uncertain.

But we stayed. Not like some mature couple in a film. Sometimes we cried. Sometimes we stayed silent. Sometimes we involved our families. Sometimes we solved things on our own. Sometimes we said hurtful things and later came back with softer hearts.

We did not become strong in just one day. We became stronger because, after breaking, we still tried to understand what had happened. And then, after two and a half years of marriage, I felt something had changed.

Now I feel we are really in love. Not the fantasy kind of love I once imagined. But the kind of love that works in real life. The kind where two people slowly become a team. The kind where you may still argue, but you no longer feel like enemies. The kind where marriage is not about proving whose family is better, whose taste is better. It is about creating something new.

Our family.
Our taste.
Our belief.
Our way.

Your spouse is not just the person you choose to marry. He is the person who sees you becoming yourself. He sees you confused, weak, ambitious, homesick, childish, brave, angry and all the faces of a girl.

And if your partner stays, if he grows with you, if he also allows himself to change, then slowly he becomes more than a partner. He becomes the “world”. Not a perfect world. No world is perfect in any way. The world has storms. It has bad weather. It has unfinished roads. It has difficult seasons. But it also has beauty. It has places where you return. It has a feeling of home.

For us, love came slowly. It came after fights. It came after apologies. It came after learning that two people can come from different homes and still build one together.

On our wedding night, we thought we had won because we had convinced the world around us. Today, I feel the real victory is winning each other’s hearts again and again, especially after difficult days.

Across cultures and societies, we celebrate weddings, anniversaries, photos with romantic captions. But we do not talk enough about the invisible work after the celebration. We do not say that sometimes the first year is not the happiest. Sometimes the second year is also difficult. And the third.

One person cannot replace the whole world. We need friends, family, dreams and our own separate selves. But sometimes, one person can hold the meaning of many relationships.

In Arjun, I found a best friend, an advisor, a witness, a partner and a home. And today, when I say I love my man, I do not say it like a romantic dialogue in a movie or book. I say it like someone who has lived through the messy, difficult, ordinary, beautiful work of love.

And maybe this is what I was trying to say from the beginning: one person can be an entire world.

Shiwani Dhiman is an Indian writer based in the Netherlands. Her writing often returns to marriage, migration, memory, womanhood and the quiet emotional lives people carry across homes and countries. More of her work can be found on Substack.