| Faisal was born in Pakistan, and I was born in the Dominican Republic. We met while studying at Baruch. He speaks Urdu and I speak Spanish. He is Muslim and I am Catholic. He likes and dances bachata and I don’t like it (bachata is a Dominican music genre). He eats spicy food and I don’t. But despite of all these differences, we love each other very much.
When I brought Faisal to my parents, everybody greeted him with a hug and kiss. Faisal warned that this is not a common practice in his culture, for a woman to hug or kiss a man she’s not related to, but on the spur of the moment I forgot and hugged and kissed his father and brother anyway.
We’ve been together for four years. We met in 2002 when we were taking a finance course. We’ve been living together in Astoria for 16 months.
We got engaged in July 2005, and we are now planning to buy an apartment in the city (in one of the boroughs). Friends and family are always asking us how we are going to raise our children, and we say that our children are going to be respectful of others’ religions and cultures.
Faisal and I are planning to change both of our last names once we get married to break with the tradition of the woman being the only one to change her last name. We are shopping for a new last name.
I majored in advertising-marketing, and Faisal’s degree is in operations management. I work for a nonprofit organization as a bilingual marketing associate, and he works for a private company as a branch/operations manager.
One of our dreams was to travel around the world. In the four years we’ve been together, we have chosen a different place each year: Vancouver, Canada; Paris, France. Last year we went to Turkey. For this year, our next trip may be to Africa or South America. We are making our dreams come true.
|
