Our Story

Our first date was a Zoom call. Caren had come down with COVID, but neither of us wanted to wait. Hours of conversation later, we had uncovered coincidence after coincidence: we had both moved from Kerala, India to California when we were four years old. Our parents were born approximately thirty miles apart in Kerala and we had grown up a similar distance away from each other in the Bay Area.

We had both grown up in communities that were almost mirror images of each other — a warm group of family friends who were second parents to us, being part of our respective Indian churches, and regular visits back to Kerala to see family. It all added up to the same cultural roots, the same upbringing, and a deeply familiar sense of home — just on different sides of the Bay.

We even discovered that Samson often walked his brother Simon's dog, Kona, right in front of Caren's apartment building because we lived at the same intersection, our paths nearly crossing for months without ever knowing it. It truly felt like it was only a matter of time!

At the end of the call, we traded book recommendations — Caren recommended a collection of essays by Jonny Sun called Goodbye Again and Samson recommended a collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri called Interpreter of Maladies and made plans to meet again. We met in person for the first time at CoffeeBar in Menlo Park. To Caren's surprise, Samson had read her book recommendation in the prior week and their date quickly turned into the first of many book clubs.

We started spending more and more time together, slowly realizing there was something uniquely special about what we had found — our relationship felt easy and obvious in a way that was new for both of us. On July 22, 2022, Caren made it official. She found a rare copy of a poetry collection at The Strand — a copy the author had hand-corrected in pencil after print and signed “corrected by the author.” Beneath his signature, she wrote: “gifted by the girlfriend,” and signed her name.

In the years that followed, we kept our book club going — reading each other's favorites and talking through them over dinner. We traveled together, spent more time with each other's families and friends, and slowly started building a life that felt like it had always been ours. Big changes came too — Samson finished medical school and matched into residency, and Caren made the jump into startup life — but we were always each other's biggest supporters through every new chapter.

On April 28, 2024, Samson booked out Caren's favorite coffee shop, Mercury Cafe, for a surprise. He had written to Jonny Sun — the author of the book we'd talked about on our very first date — and asked if he would hand-correct one of the essays from Goodbye Again to incorporate edits that Samson had made to make the essay about our relationship. He then signed it “corrected by the author.” Beneath it, Samson wrote: “gifted by the fiancé?” — and got down on one knee to ask Caren to spend the rest of her life with him.