Physically changing the routine I’d fallen into within my apartment helped, too. I stopped automatically sinking into the lovely safe spot on the couch that beckoned me to watch television there after a long day of work. Oh, how that comfy couch called to me. But rather than automatically go to it, I changed things up by going into the kitchen and sitting there for a while, or gazing out my large picture windows at the street below or the skyline beyond. Or maybe I’d just watch TV from my bedroom instead of the living room. Or I’d take my dog Diana for a walk. I found that simply changing my location sometimes changed my perspective, allowed the anchor that was holding me in place to shift a bit, to lose some of its paralyzing weight. It sounds small, I know. But changing my pattern was the beginning of real change for me. Gradually my soul started to feel less heavy.
But wait. I need to back up for a moment to tell you about Diana. In November of 2016, I did an interview with BuzzFeed in which they decided it would be fun to unleash a few wiggling puppies on me as I sat on the floor for the interview. I am eternally grateful that they did. When Diana, as I soon named her, started chewing on my Burberry shoes in the interview, I immediately understood that she had excellent taste. And then at some point she started snuggling under my arm. I was smitten. Brando, my dear cocker spaniel companion of twelve years who was being cared for by my mother and brother in Mumbai, was too old to travel. There was no way he could have moved to the States. But here was this sweet and loving bundle of intuition in whose presence I felt comforted, and so the next day I officially adopted her.
I am 100 percent certain that Diana chose me. She came into my life for a reason, helping me reengage with life before I even recognized that I might want to do so. When I arrived on set at 5 a.m. on my bleakest days, she accompanied me. When I couldn’t sleep at night, she was happy to walk with me on lonely city streets or snuggle with me in my bed. She was one of my portals back to life and she is still with me today, loving me unconditionally.
During my solitary time, I came to understand myself better. As is no doubt clear by now, I have always been a person who wants and expects to work hard, who takes pride in the fact that I work hard. This period of being alone showed me that I needed the space to do nothing, too, to just be. It turns out that every single thing that my friends had ever told me about taking time for myself, and that I’d read in self-help books, and that I’d heard from Oprah, was true. If I’d listened better or paid more attention to what I’d heard and read, maybe I could have saved myself a lot of time and pain. Or maybe not. I think part of the human journey is figuring things out for yourself, and apparently, that’s what I had to do.
Now I make sure to build free time into my day. After I wrap from work, I give myself three or four hours to do what I want before I have to be in bed, and after I finish whatever work I’m doing, I put my phone away. It might not surprise other people but it certainly surprised me when I realized that having that time to unwind and rest actually made me more productive.
I would never presume to speak to the pain of real clinical depression, or to compare my own period of depression with that condition. I’m only sharing what helped me return from a very dark period in my life, a period of deep grief that I didn’t deal with when it first settled in with me. Gradually, the heavy sense that I woke up with every morning and went to sleep with every night, the sense that life was just too daunting, dissipated. I saw that I liked laughing again. I liked people. I liked life.
For me, one of the hardest things to accept in life is that control is an illusion. I hate that I can’t control what happens in my life, but I can’t. Loss happens. Failure happens. Sorrow happens. I can’t always control where I’m headed, either. Sometimes sadness is the destination, whether or not it’s where I want to go. During my time there I had to learn to trust that I was visiting for a reason, but that it would not be my permanent place of residence, my forever state of being. That, like water, I would flow past it eventually and end up where I was meant to be.
The most important relationship in life
is the one you have with yourself.
DIANE VON FURSTENBERG
GROWING UP, I’D seen my parents’ marriage as rock solid, embodying the security that comes from knowing you have a true partner in this world. I wanted that, too. Since my professional life at times felt transitory and ephemeral, as my childhood had in certain ways—always moving, always changing—I longed for consistency and stability in relationships. Once I got involved with someone, I would give everything I had to keep our bond intact. Often to a fault.
Throughout most of my twenties and into my early thirties, my romantic pattern went something like this: I’d get involved with a wonderful man and we’d have a lovely time, usually for a period of years. By the end of the relationship, though, I’d have lost myself somehow. I’d be exhausted, discouraged, and disappointed, and I didn’t know how I’d gotten to such an unhappy place.
As almost all of my days were spent working on location and on set, most of my adult romantic relationships were with public people. I respect the privacy of those people and I respect my own, too—most of us are married now, and some of us have children—so I don’t see the need to name names. And this conversation is not about them. It’s about me. It’s about my emotional evolution. It’s about the growth it took to get where I am today in terms of understanding that true partnership is a two-way street.
Looking back on that time in my life, I see that I was working way too hard both professionally and personally. I made four films a year for almost a decade. In order to do that, I worked fifteen- or eighteen-hour days, including weekends. That’s simply the investment that was required if I wanted to reach the highest echelons of the film industry in India. But it left me almost no time outside of work, and as I reflect on that period now, I wonder if that’s how the problem started.
I know that I felt guilty about having so little time to spend with whomever I was dating during those years and so I’d end up overcompensating. I would prioritize my partners’ schedules over mine, canceling work commitments or what little time I had with friends and family in order to accommodate the needs of my partner at the time. I never missed a shoot, but I might go late to set or I would keep set waiting because I was on a phone call in my trailer. The professionalism with which I normally conducted myself seemed to disappear when I was romantically involved with someone. It would be years before I figured out why I fell into this pattern.
Eventually most of my relationships would reach a point where a breakup was inevitable because this out-of-balance situation went on for so long that there was no way to move forward. We’d get mad at each other for no obvious reason, or for a ridiculous reason, and end up arguing. Eventually that led to resentment on both sides. I’d start to feel terrible about myself, invisible and undervalued, and almost every time it happened, I believed the problem mostly lay in my partner. I never considered that maybe the problem, or at least part of the problem, lay in me.
What’s strange is that my mom did not model this behavior for me in her own marriage, not even remotely. All the women I was raised by—my aunts, my grandmothers, my mother—had extremely solid individuality in their relationships, so why didn’t I? Why was I so afraid that I might let someone down? Why did I feel so guilty at that thought? Had I taken the romanticized messages of self-sacrifice that girls and women hear all the time—that it’s our responsibility to accommodate men; that we are natural caregivers and it’s our job to care for others first, ourselves if there’s time—too much to heart? It’s not a new thought that we women are socialized that way; it’s the water we swim in from a very young age. And working at my career as hard as I did, maybe I’d never given myself enough time to drag myself out of that pool, or even see that I was swimming in it.
Whenever my mom or my friends pointed my romantic pattern out to me, I’d shrug it off. Now I think I was jus
t avoiding taking a deeper look at myself and the pattern I was locked into. And let’s be clear: I’m the one who created that pattern. I was the eraser and the erased. Before I could move forward and change the pattern, I had to own the part I played in creating so much pain for myself. I’m not unique in this; we all have our own painful patterns. Somehow I finally figured out that the only way to break the cycle was to accept my truth and continue from there. Which meant walking through a fire of sorts.
In 2016, after my last big breakup, I consciously decided that it was time to take a dating hiatus. I was finally realizing that whatever I was doing in relationships wasn’t working, and I knew I needed to focus on myself in order to understand why. Equally important, maybe more so, was the fact that my father had died more than two years earlier and I was still struggling with that grief. I had initially tried to block out my emotional devastation by throwing myself even harder into work, if that’s possible. But my grief, my confusion, and my exhaustion were all catching up with me and I was coming to understand that I needed time alone, time without a relationship. So after being in back-to-back relationships for more than a decade, I hit the pause button hard.
At first, it felt impossible. I missed having someone to call first thing in the morning, someone to wish me luck on the day’s filming, someone whom I could encourage and support in return. I missed having someone to talk to at night who was interested in how my day had unfolded. But slowly, with no one else’s behavior or needs or feelings to prioritize over mine, I began to consider my own more deeply. I began to have more of a relationship with myself.
Part of what I realized was that while I was bold and fierce in my professional life, in my personal life, where I spent way too much time looking after the needs—or what I perceived as the needs—of the men I dated, I was the exact opposite. My mother and my friends had long seen that, and now, with a little perspective, I did, too. But while my behavior in my professional life and my private life seemed polar opposite in some ways, maybe there were also some connections between those arenas. When I walk onto a set, I take my responsibility extremely seriously. I am always prepared, in part because preparation leads to confidence, and in part because there are so many people involved every day in every production that it would be irresponsible to waste people’s time by not being completely ready. In other words, at the end of each day, I want to know that I’ve done the absolute best job I possibly could.
Had my professional do-my-best attitude somehow bled into my private behavior? Was my reluctance to end a relationship I hadn’t been happy in for some time related to a fear that I hadn’t done my best to make it work? That I hadn’t done absolutely everything in my power, in fact? I have always been a solution finder professionally and don’t hesitate to take control when a problem needs fixing. If something doesn’t feel right on a set, I find a way to address it; if what I’m doing in a scene isn’t working, I find another way to approach it. Was I taking too much responsibility for solving the problems in my relationships by trying to control as many aspects of them as I could?
I finally realized the futility of this—and the craziness of it. I can’t possibly control a relationship, because I can’t control how other people think or feel about me. The only thing that I can control is myself. If I’m solid in myself, happy in myself, confident in myself, well, that’s what I can bring to the table in a relationship. And I was beginning to understand that that’s the first step in having a healthy relationship, a relationship of partners who give and take equally, who think about how things affect each party and make decisions accordingly.
At the end of 2017, I had turned a corner in my grief; I felt ready to spend more time with friends and less time on my own. As usual, I spent New Year’s Eve with Tamanna and Sudeep. I’d been single for well over a year at that point, and they joked that they were a little tired of our get-togethers being the two of them with me as a third wheel. “When are we going to go out as couples?” Sudeep teased. Then he asked me to write down the five things that were most important to me in the person I wanted to be with, five qualities that were absolute and that I would not compromise on. I started this exercise to humor my good friends, but I ended up with a frank and truthful list.
The first nonnegotiable quality of My Future Person was honesty, because there were times in some of my previous relationships when I’d been hurt by dishonesty. The second was that he had to appreciate the value of family—because a house full of kids and relatives visiting from all over the world is what I love and what I’m used to. Third: he had to take his profession very seriously, because I take mine very seriously. Fourth: I wanted someone who was creative and had the imagination to dream big with me. And fifth: I wanted someone who had drive and ambition, like I did, someone who wanted to continue to grow and evolve in all his endeavors.
I wrote the list down and saved it in my wallet. It reminded me of the clarity I’d achieved in my period of romantic solitude. I wasn’t looking for a new relationship, but I knew that when one eventually came along I wanted to enter it as my own complete person, someone who was bringing her own happiness and self-confidence to the table. Then I got to work shooting the final season of Quantico, traveling for UNICEF, and immersing myself in film projects I was developing.
Sometimes when you’re not looking for love, it appears right in front of you.
Okay, before I get into this part of my story, I want to say that not much surprises me as much as Nick Jonas did. And in a weird way, I feel like my mom manifested him. A year or two earlier, after my last disastrous relationship, she had said to me: “My wish for you is that someone would just come in and sweep you off your feet.” She and my father had married only ten days after their first date, after all.
And that’s just what Nick did. He swept me off my feet. Once we started dating, I felt like I was being carried by a giant unstoppable wave. At times I had no idea where the wave was taking me, but I rode it anyway. Have I mentioned that I love control? So you may understand how disorienting this was. But it was also thrilling.
Nick entered my life in a serious way a mere five months after I wrote my list of nonnegotiable qualities—qualities that pretty perfectly describe him, by the way. But that wasn’t the first time I’d encountered him. In the fall of 2015, I’d received a direct message from him on Twitter:
“Several people have told me we should meet.”
Several people? Really? Who were these several people? Not too long ago, Nick and I were trying to unravel how our first communication actually came about. He remembered that he was seeing my Quantico billboards—the series was just premiering—and that his older brother Kevin, who’d watched the show, thought the two of us should meet. Then Nick scrolled back through a few years’ worth of texts to his friend and my Quantico co-star Graham Rogers and found his first text to Graham about me: Priyanka. Is. Wow. (That was fun to read.) Nick heard back from Graham right away that Graham thought the two of us would really hit it off. No introduction followed, though, so Nick took matters into his own hands and DM’d me on Twitter.
When I received the message, I stared at it for a few moments. Nick Jonas. I knew who he was, of course, but I didn’t know who he was.
So naturally I did what any self-respecting girl would do. I consulted Dr. Google and got an in-depth tutorial. When I watched the music video for “Close,” which is still one of my favorite Nick songs, I was like, Okay, I have to at least go on a date with this man. Famous last words.
Curious, I DM’d him back, and somehow we managed to get past the first awkward hurdles of meeting over social media and made a start at getting to know each other.
Cut to fifteen months later. We’d been texting back and forth from time to time when Nick called unexpectedly to ask if I would be his date to President Obama’s farewell party at the White House in January of 2017. If there were a Best First Date Ever competition, that would be the
hands-down winner. Alas, that is not a part of this story. Quantico ended up filming and I couldn’t leave the set. Huge disappointment.
But Fate made it up to me. In February of 2017, I attended the Oscars for the second time, and then the after-party hosted by Vanity Fair. On my way out, this guy grabbed my hand as I walked past the bar. He turned me around and lo and behold it was Nick, who then proceeded to get down on one knee and say, “You’re real. Where have you been all my life?” I had a car waiting and a flight back to India to catch, but Nick convinced me that five minutes was enough time for a drink. One super-quick drink later, I climbed into the waiting car and sped off to the airport, a big, dopey grin on my face. And that was the first time we met IRL.
* * *
SOMETIME THAT SPRING, the Ralph Lauren atelier invited me to my first Met Gala. The gala is an extravagant star-studded fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, hosted by Vogue’s editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour. Held each year on the first Monday of May, it is the Super Bowl of fashion. I was beyond thrilled to receive my first invitation to it. The gala’s theme that year—every year has one—was “Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between,” which to me meant a kind of androgynous look, a combination of male and female. I ended up wearing a dramatic Ralph Lauren trench-coat gown with a twenty-five-foot train—definitely a statement. I absolutely loved it.
Not long after the initial invitation came, the atelier approached both Nick and me separately to invite us to walk the carpet together at the event since we would both be wearing Ralph Lauren. It sounded like fun, so independently, we agreed.
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