It was not love at first sight for Anaz and Abhijith, it all started with friendship. Anaz, 25, is doing his PhD in Malayalam while his partner, Abhijith is doing MBA. They first met each other during a meeting of Queerythm, which is a community-based organisation for the LGBTQIA+ people.
After that, they became friends. Talking about how things progressed, Anaz said, “We used to chat and meet occasionally for coffee sometimes. We discussed literally everything under the sun except romance and we eventually realised that we need this whole life to chat. That's when we realised we’re in love. We both were planning to express how we feel for each other. He said 'I love you' first and since then, we have been inseparable. It’s been about 2 years.”
Anaz and Abhijith have come out to their families and their families have accepted them happily. Anaz was aware of his sexuality from early stages of puberty but became sure of it during his college.
Anaz said, “My family was accepting and supporting. I am happy that I was able to explain everything to them. I always try to be optimistic. Luckily, there haven’t been many major challenges in my life due to my sexuality. As an introvert child, my happy moments are those lonely moments immersed in reading. The most hard period of all this was when I tried to accept myself as gay. It's a heavy process.”
He said, “Homophobia is caused due to ignorance and prejudices. We all need to try to understand that sexuality is a spectrum and love is the highest form of mutual respect. We are selflessly filling a void of ourselves with someone's respect and care. Love is everything to me.”
