This prompt was done in part with a video on my YouTube channel. This is not the original draft; it has been added to.
Prompt: “You got married to spite your parents?”
“You got married to spite your parents?”
Amari’s best friend Vivian just stared at her with an expression of disbelief. One eyebrow raised, her lips twisted halfway into a frown. Vivian hadn’t been seated at the small café long, but Amari just knew that her friend was ready to go as soon as Amari spilled the beans.
“I mean…” Amari chuckled nervously. She didn’t want to explain that Sivan—a guy she’d met and made out with once back in university—was someone that her parents would never approve of because of his status. And that, like her, he wanted to prove a point when it came to status: it didn’t matter what someone’s status was as long as they loved each other.
There were just two problems with their thinking that had Amari slightly regretting their decision: 1) in their culture, the rich were supposed to mingle with the rich and the poor with the poor and 2) she and Sivan didn’t love each other.
Neither Sivan nor Amari believed in the “marrying your status” thing. In her parents’ culture, in her culture, castes weren’t supposed to mix. Amari was to marry someone at her level or no one at all. Sivan was higher status—blessed with riches from birth and heir to one of the wealthiest companies in the world. His parents believed the same things that Amari’s parents did.
“That’s both badass and stupid,” Vivian said, crossing her arms. “Did you even think about the consequences this could have?”
Amari shrank into her seat. “Yes,” she murmured, “but that was after it was all said and done. And divorce is looked down on in our culture, so even if we don’t work out, we have to make the best of it.”
Vivian rolled her eyes. “This is just a disaster waiting to happen.”
Amari cringed at her best friends’ words but knew she was telling the truth. Sivan was out of the country at the moment; he had to handle a potential financial disaster and break the news to his parents that he married a girl that wanted to teach kids for a living.
Not that there was anything wrong with teaching, but both she and her husband knew that his parents wouldn’t see anything past the monetary value of her job. Nevermind she was teaching students that would be the next generation.
And she had to break the news to her parents as well. She already knew that her fragile mother would faint; just the thought Amari had broken another tradition would be too much for her. Her father would just glare at her for marrying outside their status and wouldn’t talk to her. And she was close to her father, so she knew that silence would hurt.
Both of their in-laws would be so incredibly disappointed and angry and she wasn’t sure how she and Sivan were going to get through it. Though he’d promised that he’d go through the backlash by her side, she knew that he’d be in less trouble because she would be seen as the one that seduced him, trapped him, when it was the other way around.
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