Salil and Yousuf

When Salil and Yousuf met in 2005 in Miami, Florida, they had graduate school, not marriage, on their minds: Salil had left his village and working-class family in northern India to study neuroscience, and Yousuf had left Bangladesh for cardiovascular research. "That's the only way it worked out [between us]," says Salil during his interview. "Yousuf was so career-driven! If we'd been studying the same thing, Yousuf would have gotten way too competitive.” However, after Yousuf was diagnosed with stage 2 cancer in 2007, it was a wakeup call: "I had been very career-driven and aggressive, and would give up relationships to move forward … but [cancer] made me put personal life at least at the same level as professional life.”

Like many LGBT couples, Salil and Yousuf have multiple anniversaries they celebrate: the first is November 12, for the day their relationship began, when a tropical storm struck Miami and Salil had to stay over at Yousuf’s apartment, and the second is October 9, for their legal marriage in Bloomington, Indiana on a local friend's property near Lake Monroe. Before gay marriage was legalized in 2015, the two had never considered getting married—Yousuf had told Salil “I’ll never get married” to reassure him he would “never get married to a girl.” "Marriage" and "getting married to a girl" were synonymous.

Though Salil and Yousuf live in Bloomington, Indiana, and describe the town as “very welcoming,” there have still been hiccups along the way: when the two went to buy a house in Bloomington, the realtor did not know what to put on the deed. Was “husband and husband” appropriate? Eventually, they chose “partner and partner.”

"Marriage" and "getting married to a girl" were synonymous.

At the time of Salil and Yousuf’s interview in 2017, the two were still negotiating very different answers to the question: “what is family to you?” Yousuf states he is “all about the nuclear family,” and that he “wants to be an parent for the experience of parenting.” For him, this means that extended family need not be involved in the upbringing of his future children—no need to come out to extended family members, no need to need to mention a same-sex marriage to them. For Salil, his answer is nearly opposite.

However different their conceptions of family may be, Salil and Yousuf can agree on one thing: they are committed to starting one with each other. Currently, Salil and Yousuf are considering moving elsewhere in the U.S. to raise children, to a state where adoption laws are less difficult to navigate for gay couples.