“What are you supposed to do on a date?” my aunt asked me a few months ago. “Tell me so I don’t look stupid.” We were talking on the phone as she got ready for her first-ever dinner “date” with my uncle — they’ve been married for 23 years, but it took her turning 45 for him to take her out. (A story for another time.) “You’re asking the wrong person,” I told her. “I’ve never been on one.” It was a fib, but one I uttered almost without thinking, adopting a nonchalance I have perfected over years of lying to my family about my whereabouts, my weekend plans, and most importantly, my love life. In my experience, there’s a specific style of raising children reserved for the eldest daughters in South Asian families. We are taught to be obedient to a fault. We’re trained to be our siblings’ proxy parents, and are told that in order to uphold the family’s pride and respect, we must never indulge in vices like alcohol or drugs — or dating. As the oldest child in my north Indian family, I was raised to conform to these standards. As such, when I had my first boyfriend at 14, telling my parents didn’t even feel like an option. I knew if they found out, they’d make my fledgling courtship — which consisted mostly of exhausting our daily text message limit sending each other <3 and :* emoticons and getting a rush out of sneakily holding hands in class — into a much bigger deal than it was. And that’s exactly what happened. Digging through my school bag one day, my folks found a notebook that contained our innocent attempts at flirting. I was grounded for the rest of the school year so I could “avoid distractions and focus on studying,” and I was beaten. (Corporal punishment is, sadly, common in some South Asian families, and I was no stranger to it.)