June 7, 2021 • 24 mins
Just a couple of kids from Michigan — Sanjay and Rebecca nonetheless had deep backgrounds that were very different. But interweaving his Indian family with her Scandinavian heritage was much easier than you might expect, thanks to this smart, grounded pair whose marriage made all the sense in the world. Hear the nation’s favorite Doctor in a truly American story of love and family.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin. Hi, I'm Phil Donahue and I'm Marlo Thomas, and
we're going on a series of double dates to find
out what makes a marriage last. That old expression is
(00:41):
there a doctor in the house was never more fitting
than one afternoon when Marlow and I had the doctor
in our house. Rebecca and doctor Sanjay Gupta were in
town from Atlanta, so they dropped by our apartment to
talk marriage. From the first moment they walked in, you
could feel their calm compatibility. They have three daughters and
(01:02):
a busy life, and they do a lot of philanthropic
work together. It's a relationship that's built on different cultural backgrounds.
Unlike Rebecca, whose family is Scandinavian, Sanjay grew up with
a distinct sense of being an outsider as an Indian
American in a small Michigan town. I don't think people
knew what to make of Indians. That was the only Indian,
(01:23):
you know, really there, So there was no there was
no history with I was obviously different colored skin, had
a funny name, you know, all that sort of stuff.
But other than that, there was no There was no
institutional prejudice that I that I experienced with Like with
with Rebecca's family obviously any of that sort of stuff.
There was other prejudices just because you were different. That
(01:46):
was yeah, I mean, you know where I grew up,
Especially if you're the only person that looks like me,
you tend to then take on the characteristic and other
people's minds of every sort of you know, fringe group.
So you know, for for example, the Iran hostage crisis
(02:07):
was happening in nineteen seventy nine. You remember Jimmy Carter
was president and and um, I was ten years old
and I'm not Iranian. But you know, it didn't matter.
You were suddenly somebody else. You know, you were an
outsider during that time. So I remember that being a
really hard time, the Iran hostage crisis, for because it
was such a such a big thing in the news
(02:30):
and and every day it was something you know, um,
and you know, it didn't make sense for me to
remind people that wasn't Iranian. It kind of was missing
the point, right, But so so yeah, there was there was.
There was a fair amount of bullying. I think that
happened you know, younger younger years in particular. Well, what's
(02:50):
interesting is I think Detroit is unique in that it has.
That's how it kind of it's a huge immigration community,
but everybody stays in like their little neighborhood. The largest
Arabic population outside of Saudi Arabia, and it's in Dearborn,
I think, right, dear h that was born, dear boy,
that right? Yeah, Suci, I imagine that Sanjay's childhood experience
(03:14):
would cause this couple to have completely different points of view.
That's what I would have thought too. We kind of
grew up similar, so we have very similar values. We
grew up similar. Yeah. See it's hard to say that
with his parents being Indian and mind not, I guess,
but um, we both came from small towns in Michigan,
(03:36):
and both came from parents of like, you know, working,
you know, white collar parents kind of. My father worked
for Ford Motor Company, just like his parents worked for
Ford Motor Company. Um, you know, they, all of our
parents just their one desire was us to have a
great education and then they made all of them made
(03:58):
sacrifices for that to happen. And we kind of have
that in common. We we feel that that's important when
we have other I mean, we both grew up drinking
theme in powdered milk, so we have things that were
in common for us. You're Rebecca Olsen. Yeah, that sounds
like a character in a family sitcom. I think it
(04:21):
was a character in a couple of books. But Tom
Sawyer and a few others before that. Wow, that was
a great winning Was that okay? With your parents? My Um,
it's interesting. I think that there was a deep desire,
(04:41):
especially for immigrants, to have their children marry within the
same culture. My parents were a little different. It was interesting.
My my mom was from pakist what is now Pakistan.
She fled during the partition, so she was a refugee
child for the first twelve fifteen years of her life. Um,
(05:03):
and my dad was was in India, so they're both Indian,
but but for my dad's side of the family, she
represented a very different part of India, alm so different
that it was like a completely different country, completely different culture.
And when they got married, neither one of their parents
attended the wedding. Oh the well, yeah, I mean they
(05:27):
just did. They didn't support it. They didn't support the
wedding and well that day in each they both would
have had arranged marriages and instead his parents met in
the United States outside of their own parents, and because
they met in the United States and not some neither
of them had their own parents arranged who they were
(05:48):
going to marry. Both of their own parents were kind
of like, m this isn't what we set up and
this is in our traditions, So they were a little
bit against his parents were pretting married. So your parents
married in this country, people immigrated here. They both immigrated
and getting married here a love marriage as opposed to
in arranged marriages. Rebecca said, it was very unusual. I mean, I,
(06:09):
you know, in a bigger deal over time. I didn't.
Now I've met tons of people who are my contemporaries
Indians whose parents, all of them had arranged marriages. So
we haven't found anybody else that sort of gotten married
the way that my parents did. And as a result,
my friends, especially my friends, who were thinking about getting married,
(06:30):
especially if it was someone who was not Indian, it
was always my parents that they would go to to
talk to. They became those parents for you know, all
my friends who wanted Okay, you guys did this sort
of very radical thing by having a love marriage, and
you weren't even from the same part of India, the
same cast, the same background. How did it work? And
(06:52):
so when we were talking about getting married while there,
I think still a desire on their part for me
to marry somebody Indian. They were much more that they
had lived through that, they went through it. Although I
say that at the beginning they still really wanted him
to marry somebody India, right and um, and then while
(07:13):
we were dating and they realized that it was that
we were more likely to be together, then they started
to you know, be more accepting of it. Did you
have Indian girlfriends before then? Um? Yeah, I did any thing,
nothing too too serious, but yeah, um, and it was
all in college, you know, it wasn't anything earlier, so
(07:35):
these weren't necessarily you know, my dad was funny. He Um,
he said, I don't want to meet any of these
girls unless you're going to marry him. That's basically what
he told me, and my mom sort of followed that,
and you know, it was in line with that. So
they're not frivolous people. They're you know, they're they're engineers,
they're they're they're mathematics people. They didn't talk about love,
(07:59):
they didn't talk about marriage that so you know, if
I brought home a girlfriend and I was like, look,
are you marrying her? Is that why we're meeting her
or not? What's the point? Yeah, what's the point? Yeah,
it really was. What's the point? They didn't. There wasn't
a lot of they're not a particularly emotional couple. I mean,
they're loving, but they're not very emotional in this regard.
(08:20):
So my dad still shook my hand, I mean every
single time. There was no hugs until I came along.
And now if I don't hug him when I'm walking
the door, he's like, where's my hug. So it's sweet
how they've kind of warmed up to part and part
of that I think is like my mom's parents and
my dad, and my dad's parents and my mom, they
(08:40):
didn't because again there was this friction that always existed,
so he could feel it as soon when it for me,
when it was when the grandparents were over, it was
a palpable tension and there was a lot of nice
to meet you, and I, you know, shaking my hands
because it wasn't arranged. And then they felt like they
were very different backgrounds and and I don't think that
my my dad's parents probably ever, even until the very end,
(09:04):
fully accepted my mom. Wow, my mom was family was
not very devout. My dad's mom was probably the most
devout Hindu out of all four grandparents. Um. She was
a Jane, which is a very sort of a more
strict Hindu, you know, tenant. But I think, you know,
just because my mom's parents were, they were fleeing, they were,
(09:26):
you know, fleeing persecution, and you know, the idea of
religion was a bit of an indulgence. I think for them.
You know, we had a little we had a little
deity in our house growing up, but you know, there
weren't any temples, so it wasn't like we could really
be devout in the United States at that time in
the sixties. But they had experienced religious persecution in Pakistan
(09:49):
for sure, causant to leave that. They were definitely more
reserved about showing any kind of religious What about your parents,
how did they feel about you're marrying a Hindu person? Um? Well,
good question. Um my dad had passed away long before
him and I started to date me. He probably, Um,
(10:11):
who knows how he would react anything. We'd probably have
been fine by the time we married. Um my mom
would have been. I mean like he'd gotten like you know,
he was um, he was he was finished and Swedish,
So it wasn't that he he was just like, you know,
we stay at home and we do our things and
we wasn't until they retired that they suddenly developed this
(10:35):
huge social life, right, And I think my dad probably
would have had been very similar except for the fact
that he passed away before you know, before he even retired,
when he passed fifty, and would have About your mom,
how did she feel about san Jay? Oh? She she
loved him. She she My mom's just fig sweetheart. She
loves she. She thinks he's so smart and fascinating and
(10:58):
even to this day she's like, well, I want to
know where he is as I worry about him, and
and she's very like like humble and chi around him.
So it's kind of sweet. Right. My mother was Italian,
she's gone. My father was Lebanese and they were the
children of arranged marriages, you know, but both both my
grandparents were arranged marriages. But my mother didn't like Irish people. Yeah,
(11:24):
I read a huge article about that. Did she live
here in New York and into Michigan Detroit in Detroit
in a sort of lower middle class and mean, her
father was Italian and they had two trucks and they
sold produce off their trucks. So there were five kids.
They went to school, they had an education, and my
(11:44):
grandmother stayed home. But she was a singer and got
little job singing in the synagogue or the church or
whoever would have her. She would love to sing. But
but in those poor neighborhoods, you know, the Jews had
their area and the Irish their area, and the Italian
said their area, and so the Irish were considered sort
(12:05):
of the lower class people and the shandy Irish. So
when I first told my mother I was going out
with Phil Donahue, she said, oh, he's Irish, and it
was like my mother had a thing there. And then
well then she got to know him and she loved him. Well,
he won her over, he said, with his Irish malarkey.
You know, he won her over. So how did you meet?
(12:26):
I did we meet at a bar? As a classic
American story, mutual friends introduced us in college. Yeah, we
went to the University of Michigan. Yeah, and I think
when we met we were both dating someone else at
the time. We definitely had more of a shared experience
right away. We just had a lot that we had
(12:48):
in common talk about right out of the gate, and
you were thinking about I mean, I know we were
taking she was taking a lot of science classes. I
remember that because she was really good at it, and
I was saying I needed to get my act together.
I was going to go to medical school. He says,
we'll have more ter a quick break. We're back to
(13:24):
our conversation with san Jay and Rebecca Gupta. It seems
these two have found the path to harmony together, but
as we all know, spending a lifetime with another person
requires some doing, especially when it comes to dealing with
each other's differences. You're absolutely right that there's accommodations that
you have to make. And like, I'm a really neat person.
(13:50):
I'm not aligning people who are not neat. But but
I think that for me, you know, it's just it's
it's just how I am and she's not. It's not
that I'm not a neat nick. There's just there's only
so much time in dating get everything in the world.
His office is like nothing on it but the one
(14:12):
little computer, because his life is it's like on the computer.
He can store everything there, he writes everything there, maybe
a glass of water. I mean that it's just just
and my office is a constant mess, and there's everybody's
in and out of my office and they trip over
stuff and knock it all over the place. And he
walks in. He's like, my mind is gonna I'm gonna
lose it. Like, just shut the door. That's how we
(14:33):
can get along. Visceral sort of pain as I and
she says, I can't find something, IM go really, but
I was What I was going to say, though, is
that the accommodation are all offset by trust to me,
you know, And that's probably the the the heart of
the whole thing is that, like I don't trust anybody
(14:56):
more than I trust Rebecca to have my best interests,
and that can be with regard to you know, our
financial stuff. But also like I don't know what to
do here. I'm dealing with something I'm not sure what
the right answer is and there's no absolute right answer,
but there's probably a right answer for me. And so
(15:16):
who do I like, who would who would be able
to answer that? And I think my parents can't answer
that because ultimately they they're incapable, I think, fundamentally, of
seeing things from outside their vantage point. They can't put
themselves outside their own shoes. It's not a bad thing,
it's just who they are. She can. I can tolerate
the messy office, and I can tolerate because I come
(15:37):
home at the end of the day and I'm dealing
with stuff. And it was always me. I was a
pretty solitary creature, and then all of a sudden, I
started like dabbling in this idea of letting someone else in.
She's really good at it, and I trusted her. When
you have a big argument, there's one of you pout
(15:58):
or false silent or yes he really end I mean
he's still mad about me for buying him a hand sandwich,
like you know, fifteen years ago or something. I mean,
some big arguments on and on, and then they'd become
even though they might be like poking at a at
a splinter, but still there, they almost become kind of
(16:20):
you know, like a running joke or something. We've had
big arguments, for sure, and I think the longest they've
lasted is probably a couple three days. In the sense
that not not that we're at it for a couple
three days, but we're definitely still pissed off, both of us.
And and but you know, um, I came from a
(16:42):
really pretty sedate household. I could probably count on one
hand the number of times it was really yelling as
when as a child, when I grew up, and I
can remember those times because they were so jarring, you know.
So it's not really the style I think for us
to have like a big argument, the sense that it's
explosive in any way. But I will get upset. I'm
(17:04):
much more transparent about it now. I would hold it
in expect her to figure it out, And then I
realized at some point that was a waste of time,
because why am I waiting for her to figure it?
I could just tell her and you know it's not
then at least they can get it off my chest.
What do you think you were waiting? That's an interesting
thing because I was being passive aggressive, like if she
(17:26):
didn't figure it out, I could just do even longer
you know about it, you know, like I was being
feeling vindicated that she didn't even know why I would
be upset, Like how could you know I've been married
how long? And you don't even know this thing about me,
you know, so there would be that that part of it,
I will say, and I think this is a little
(17:47):
bit of a difference between men and women, although you know,
I can't obviously speak for all men or all women,
but you know, I have friends, but I don't have
a lot of friends that I would talk to about
that kind of stuff. So she was the person that
I would talk to. There were times too, and I
would look at him and I'd say, can you not
being greet because I need to talk to my best
friend right now to how to solve this problem, and
(18:10):
that would help him go, Okay, Yes, we need to
kind of shift gears into from the emotional we're upset
about whatever it is that has caused us to be upset,
to the intellectual what are we going to do about it? Now?
It's really hard for me to be mad at him
for very long because he always makes me laugh and
he's so smart that it really, you know, keeps me going,
(18:36):
makes me constantly be on my toes, which I love that.
What do you think are some of the A couple
of the things that you have to have in order
to have a marriage, last genuine respect, you know, I
think everything else follows from that probably and you know
there's people who you might really like and even love,
(18:59):
but maybe when you really think about it, you don't
respect that in every single way. And then trust for me,
you know, I don't know. May maybe it's because I
didn't have a lot of people that I trusted and
so I mean as a child or as a child
and even you know, I mean when you go through
um MED school and it's it's it's such a competitive environment,
(19:23):
you know. Um, you know where where I started, I
was accepted into medical school out of high school. So
it was a program that did that and everyone was
very some of them are my good friends now, but
it was very competitive environment. Um. You know, people sabotaged
each other's experiments and no one was rooting for each other.
(19:43):
Everyone was rooting for themselves, and so trust in that
environment was challenging. I think once I got into training
and nursergery training, it was it was better because now
we were all sort of a more shared experience. But well,
what is what are yours? So? Um? So I was
a family law attorney, so I represented people and divorces
(20:04):
or people who were at that point where their relationships
were going the wrong way, and I can tend the
number one thing that causes people to divorce from my
experience was resentment. And resentment can if when resentment starts,
then all the other things go. When you know, when
like if he's working really hard and making all the
(20:26):
money and I'm you know, and he resents that, you know,
I'm not contributing to that, or if I'm with like
babies crying and you know, having no sleep and I
start to resent him for being on the road and
getting eight hours of sleep or something, and resentment really
only can be cured through communication before the resentment builds.
(20:49):
And I have to say there have been a few
times when I will say to him, I'm working way
too hard and I and I need you to notice.
I think that's a great point. I haven't heard that before,
that you notice something that is making you get to
the brink of resentful and so you know the only
way out of that is to communicate. And he works
(21:11):
so hard and making sure that he is home, you know,
he's set up he operates every Monday just so that
he's home every weekend, so that way that he's always
there for games. Yeah, do you do stuff without the
kids together. Yeah, yeah, I mean, dude, we'll do trips. Yeah,
we have a we have a group of friends that
we travel with. Uh, you know, once a year, maybe
(21:36):
twice a year, depending. And then and then Rebecca and
I will we'll go out on date nights. You know,
we'll just go out to dinner. Um, I just like
to go more so now you know that the kids are,
you know, they're more independent. Yeah. If there was a
young couple who are about to be married, or thinking
about getting married, or on the fence about getting married,
(21:56):
what do you think you would want to pass on?
Nothing in life is perfect? And I think you know,
perfect is often the enemy of a very very good
and and I you know, we say that in the
operating room a lot. I just want to take out
this last piece of tumor, but it's right against something
important And if you do that, you could sacrifice all
(22:18):
the incredible work you've just been doing for the last
several hours in search of perfection. I think it's the
same thing in marriage. I mean, you know, once you've committed,
then being in search of perfection can be a destructive force.
And that's something that I think I learned and I
would pass that on and we do pinch ourselves every
(22:38):
day and just think we get really lucky. You know,
if you can internalize that, I think that's a really
powerful force. That's Sanjay and Rebecca Gupta. I can't decide
what impressed me more how nice they are or how
smart they are, but more important, they have a quiet
(22:59):
and deep understanding of each other. Now we can say
we know a doctor who makes house calls all the
way from Atlanta and brings his wife until next time.
I'm Phil Donahue and I'm Marlo Thomas. You guys have
been great. Yeah, we appreciate the conversation. It's fun. Double
(23:20):
Day is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show was
created by US and produced by Sarah Lily. Michael Bahari
is associate producer. Musical adaptations of It Had to Be
You by Stellwagen, Simfinette, Marlo and I are executive producers,
along with Mia Lobell and Letal Molad from Pushkin. Special
(23:44):
thanks to Jacob Wiseberg, Malcolm Gladwell, Heather Faine, John Snars,
Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek, Jason Gambrel, Paul Williams,
and Bruce Kluger. If you like our show, please remember
to share, rate, and review. Thanks for listening.
Pushkin. Hi, I'm Phil Donahue and I'm Marlo Thomas, and
we're going on a series of double dates to find
out what makes a marriage last. That old expression is
(00:41):
there a doctor in the house was never more fitting
than one afternoon when Marlow and I had the doctor
in our house. Rebecca and doctor Sanjay Gupta were in
town from Atlanta, so they dropped by our apartment to
talk marriage. From the first moment they walked in, you
could feel their calm compatibility. They have three daughters and
(01:02):
a busy life, and they do a lot of philanthropic
work together. It's a relationship that's built on different cultural backgrounds.
Unlike Rebecca, whose family is Scandinavian, Sanjay grew up with
a distinct sense of being an outsider as an Indian
American in a small Michigan town. I don't think people
knew what to make of Indians. That was the only Indian,
(01:23):
you know, really there, So there was no there was
no history with I was obviously different colored skin, had
a funny name, you know, all that sort of stuff.
But other than that, there was no There was no
institutional prejudice that I that I experienced with Like with
with Rebecca's family obviously any of that sort of stuff.
There was other prejudices just because you were different. That
(01:46):
was yeah, I mean, you know where I grew up,
Especially if you're the only person that looks like me,
you tend to then take on the characteristic and other
people's minds of every sort of you know, fringe group.
So you know, for for example, the Iran hostage crisis
(02:07):
was happening in nineteen seventy nine. You remember Jimmy Carter
was president and and um, I was ten years old
and I'm not Iranian. But you know, it didn't matter.
You were suddenly somebody else. You know, you were an
outsider during that time. So I remember that being a
really hard time, the Iran hostage crisis, for because it
was such a such a big thing in the news
(02:30):
and and every day it was something you know, um,
and you know, it didn't make sense for me to
remind people that wasn't Iranian. It kind of was missing
the point, right, But so so yeah, there was there was.
There was a fair amount of bullying. I think that
happened you know, younger younger years in particular. Well, what's
(02:50):
interesting is I think Detroit is unique in that it has.
That's how it kind of it's a huge immigration community,
but everybody stays in like their little neighborhood. The largest
Arabic population outside of Saudi Arabia, and it's in Dearborn,
I think, right, dear h that was born, dear boy,
that right? Yeah, Suci, I imagine that Sanjay's childhood experience
(03:14):
would cause this couple to have completely different points of view.
That's what I would have thought too. We kind of
grew up similar, so we have very similar values. We
grew up similar. Yeah. See it's hard to say that
with his parents being Indian and mind not, I guess,
but um, we both came from small towns in Michigan,
(03:36):
and both came from parents of like, you know, working,
you know, white collar parents kind of. My father worked
for Ford Motor Company, just like his parents worked for
Ford Motor Company. Um, you know, they, all of our
parents just their one desire was us to have a
great education and then they made all of them made
(03:58):
sacrifices for that to happen. And we kind of have
that in common. We we feel that that's important when
we have other I mean, we both grew up drinking
theme in powdered milk, so we have things that were
in common for us. You're Rebecca Olsen. Yeah, that sounds
like a character in a family sitcom. I think it
(04:21):
was a character in a couple of books. But Tom
Sawyer and a few others before that. Wow, that was
a great winning Was that okay? With your parents? My Um,
it's interesting. I think that there was a deep desire,
(04:41):
especially for immigrants, to have their children marry within the
same culture. My parents were a little different. It was interesting.
My my mom was from pakist what is now Pakistan.
She fled during the partition, so she was a refugee
child for the first twelve fifteen years of her life. Um,
(05:03):
and my dad was was in India, so they're both Indian,
but but for my dad's side of the family, she
represented a very different part of India, alm so different
that it was like a completely different country, completely different culture.
And when they got married, neither one of their parents
attended the wedding. Oh the well, yeah, I mean they
(05:27):
just did. They didn't support it. They didn't support the
wedding and well that day in each they both would
have had arranged marriages and instead his parents met in
the United States outside of their own parents, and because
they met in the United States and not some neither
of them had their own parents arranged who they were
(05:48):
going to marry. Both of their own parents were kind
of like, m this isn't what we set up and
this is in our traditions, So they were a little
bit against his parents were pretting married. So your parents
married in this country, people immigrated here. They both immigrated
and getting married here a love marriage as opposed to
in arranged marriages. Rebecca said, it was very unusual. I mean, I,
(06:09):
you know, in a bigger deal over time. I didn't.
Now I've met tons of people who are my contemporaries
Indians whose parents, all of them had arranged marriages. So
we haven't found anybody else that sort of gotten married
the way that my parents did. And as a result,
my friends, especially my friends, who were thinking about getting married,
(06:30):
especially if it was someone who was not Indian, it
was always my parents that they would go to to
talk to. They became those parents for you know, all
my friends who wanted Okay, you guys did this sort
of very radical thing by having a love marriage, and
you weren't even from the same part of India, the
same cast, the same background. How did it work? And
(06:52):
so when we were talking about getting married while there,
I think still a desire on their part for me
to marry somebody Indian. They were much more that they
had lived through that, they went through it. Although I
say that at the beginning they still really wanted him
to marry somebody India, right and um, and then while
(07:13):
we were dating and they realized that it was that
we were more likely to be together, then they started
to you know, be more accepting of it. Did you
have Indian girlfriends before then? Um? Yeah, I did any thing,
nothing too too serious, but yeah, um, and it was
all in college, you know, it wasn't anything earlier, so
(07:35):
these weren't necessarily you know, my dad was funny. He Um,
he said, I don't want to meet any of these
girls unless you're going to marry him. That's basically what
he told me, and my mom sort of followed that,
and you know, it was in line with that. So
they're not frivolous people. They're you know, they're they're engineers,
they're they're they're mathematics people. They didn't talk about love,
(07:59):
they didn't talk about marriage that so you know, if
I brought home a girlfriend and I was like, look,
are you marrying her? Is that why we're meeting her
or not? What's the point? Yeah, what's the point? Yeah,
it really was. What's the point? They didn't. There wasn't
a lot of they're not a particularly emotional couple. I mean,
they're loving, but they're not very emotional in this regard.
(08:20):
So my dad still shook my hand, I mean every
single time. There was no hugs until I came along.
And now if I don't hug him when I'm walking
the door, he's like, where's my hug. So it's sweet
how they've kind of warmed up to part and part
of that I think is like my mom's parents and
my dad, and my dad's parents and my mom, they
(08:40):
didn't because again there was this friction that always existed,
so he could feel it as soon when it for me,
when it was when the grandparents were over, it was
a palpable tension and there was a lot of nice
to meet you, and I, you know, shaking my hands
because it wasn't arranged. And then they felt like they
were very different backgrounds and and I don't think that
my my dad's parents probably ever, even until the very end,
(09:04):
fully accepted my mom. Wow, my mom was family was
not very devout. My dad's mom was probably the most
devout Hindu out of all four grandparents. Um. She was
a Jane, which is a very sort of a more
strict Hindu, you know, tenant. But I think, you know,
just because my mom's parents were, they were fleeing, they were,
(09:26):
you know, fleeing persecution, and you know, the idea of
religion was a bit of an indulgence. I think for them.
You know, we had a little we had a little
deity in our house growing up, but you know, there
weren't any temples, so it wasn't like we could really
be devout in the United States at that time in
the sixties. But they had experienced religious persecution in Pakistan
(09:49):
for sure, causant to leave that. They were definitely more
reserved about showing any kind of religious What about your parents,
how did they feel about you're marrying a Hindu person? Um? Well,
good question. Um my dad had passed away long before
him and I started to date me. He probably, Um,
(10:11):
who knows how he would react anything. We'd probably have
been fine by the time we married. Um my mom
would have been. I mean like he'd gotten like you know,
he was um, he was he was finished and Swedish,
So it wasn't that he he was just like, you know,
we stay at home and we do our things and
we wasn't until they retired that they suddenly developed this
(10:35):
huge social life, right, And I think my dad probably
would have had been very similar except for the fact
that he passed away before you know, before he even retired,
when he passed fifty, and would have About your mom,
how did she feel about san Jay? Oh? She she
loved him. She she My mom's just fig sweetheart. She
loves she. She thinks he's so smart and fascinating and
(10:58):
even to this day she's like, well, I want to
know where he is as I worry about him, and
and she's very like like humble and chi around him.
So it's kind of sweet. Right. My mother was Italian,
she's gone. My father was Lebanese and they were the
children of arranged marriages, you know, but both both my
grandparents were arranged marriages. But my mother didn't like Irish people. Yeah,
(11:24):
I read a huge article about that. Did she live
here in New York and into Michigan Detroit in Detroit
in a sort of lower middle class and mean, her
father was Italian and they had two trucks and they
sold produce off their trucks. So there were five kids.
They went to school, they had an education, and my
(11:44):
grandmother stayed home. But she was a singer and got
little job singing in the synagogue or the church or
whoever would have her. She would love to sing. But
but in those poor neighborhoods, you know, the Jews had
their area and the Irish their area, and the Italian
said their area, and so the Irish were considered sort
(12:05):
of the lower class people and the shandy Irish. So
when I first told my mother I was going out
with Phil Donahue, she said, oh, he's Irish, and it
was like my mother had a thing there. And then
well then she got to know him and she loved him. Well,
he won her over, he said, with his Irish malarkey.
You know, he won her over. So how did you meet?
(12:26):
I did we meet at a bar? As a classic
American story, mutual friends introduced us in college. Yeah, we
went to the University of Michigan. Yeah, and I think
when we met we were both dating someone else at
the time. We definitely had more of a shared experience
right away. We just had a lot that we had
(12:48):
in common talk about right out of the gate, and
you were thinking about I mean, I know we were
taking she was taking a lot of science classes. I
remember that because she was really good at it, and
I was saying I needed to get my act together.
I was going to go to medical school. He says,
we'll have more ter a quick break. We're back to
(13:24):
our conversation with san Jay and Rebecca Gupta. It seems
these two have found the path to harmony together, but
as we all know, spending a lifetime with another person
requires some doing, especially when it comes to dealing with
each other's differences. You're absolutely right that there's accommodations that
you have to make. And like, I'm a really neat person.
(13:50):
I'm not aligning people who are not neat. But but
I think that for me, you know, it's just it's
it's just how I am and she's not. It's not
that I'm not a neat nick. There's just there's only
so much time in dating get everything in the world.
His office is like nothing on it but the one
(14:12):
little computer, because his life is it's like on the computer.
He can store everything there, he writes everything there, maybe
a glass of water. I mean that it's just just
and my office is a constant mess, and there's everybody's
in and out of my office and they trip over
stuff and knock it all over the place. And he
walks in. He's like, my mind is gonna I'm gonna
lose it. Like, just shut the door. That's how we
(14:33):
can get along. Visceral sort of pain as I and
she says, I can't find something, IM go really, but
I was What I was going to say, though, is
that the accommodation are all offset by trust to me,
you know, And that's probably the the the heart of
the whole thing is that, like I don't trust anybody
(14:56):
more than I trust Rebecca to have my best interests,
and that can be with regard to you know, our
financial stuff. But also like I don't know what to
do here. I'm dealing with something I'm not sure what
the right answer is and there's no absolute right answer,
but there's probably a right answer for me. And so
(15:16):
who do I like, who would who would be able
to answer that? And I think my parents can't answer
that because ultimately they they're incapable, I think, fundamentally, of
seeing things from outside their vantage point. They can't put
themselves outside their own shoes. It's not a bad thing,
it's just who they are. She can. I can tolerate
the messy office, and I can tolerate because I come
(15:37):
home at the end of the day and I'm dealing
with stuff. And it was always me. I was a
pretty solitary creature, and then all of a sudden, I
started like dabbling in this idea of letting someone else in.
She's really good at it, and I trusted her. When
you have a big argument, there's one of you pout
(15:58):
or false silent or yes he really end I mean
he's still mad about me for buying him a hand sandwich,
like you know, fifteen years ago or something. I mean,
some big arguments on and on, and then they'd become
even though they might be like poking at a at
a splinter, but still there, they almost become kind of
(16:20):
you know, like a running joke or something. We've had
big arguments, for sure, and I think the longest they've
lasted is probably a couple three days. In the sense
that not not that we're at it for a couple
three days, but we're definitely still pissed off, both of us.
And and but you know, um, I came from a
(16:42):
really pretty sedate household. I could probably count on one
hand the number of times it was really yelling as
when as a child, when I grew up, and I
can remember those times because they were so jarring, you know.
So it's not really the style I think for us
to have like a big argument, the sense that it's
explosive in any way. But I will get upset. I'm
(17:04):
much more transparent about it now. I would hold it
in expect her to figure it out, And then I
realized at some point that was a waste of time,
because why am I waiting for her to figure it?
I could just tell her and you know it's not
then at least they can get it off my chest.
What do you think you were waiting? That's an interesting
thing because I was being passive aggressive, like if she
(17:26):
didn't figure it out, I could just do even longer
you know about it, you know, like I was being
feeling vindicated that she didn't even know why I would
be upset, Like how could you know I've been married
how long? And you don't even know this thing about me,
you know, so there would be that that part of it,
I will say, and I think this is a little
(17:47):
bit of a difference between men and women, although you know,
I can't obviously speak for all men or all women,
but you know, I have friends, but I don't have
a lot of friends that I would talk to about
that kind of stuff. So she was the person that
I would talk to. There were times too, and I
would look at him and I'd say, can you not
being greet because I need to talk to my best
friend right now to how to solve this problem, and
(18:10):
that would help him go, Okay, Yes, we need to
kind of shift gears into from the emotional we're upset
about whatever it is that has caused us to be upset,
to the intellectual what are we going to do about it? Now?
It's really hard for me to be mad at him
for very long because he always makes me laugh and
he's so smart that it really, you know, keeps me going,
(18:36):
makes me constantly be on my toes, which I love that.
What do you think are some of the A couple
of the things that you have to have in order
to have a marriage, last genuine respect, you know, I
think everything else follows from that probably and you know
there's people who you might really like and even love,
(18:59):
but maybe when you really think about it, you don't
respect that in every single way. And then trust for me,
you know, I don't know. May maybe it's because I
didn't have a lot of people that I trusted and
so I mean as a child or as a child
and even you know, I mean when you go through
um MED school and it's it's it's such a competitive environment,
(19:23):
you know. Um, you know where where I started, I
was accepted into medical school out of high school. So
it was a program that did that and everyone was
very some of them are my good friends now, but
it was very competitive environment. Um. You know, people sabotaged
each other's experiments and no one was rooting for each other.
(19:43):
Everyone was rooting for themselves, and so trust in that
environment was challenging. I think once I got into training
and nursergery training, it was it was better because now
we were all sort of a more shared experience. But well,
what is what are yours? So? Um? So I was
a family law attorney, so I represented people and divorces
(20:04):
or people who were at that point where their relationships
were going the wrong way, and I can tend the
number one thing that causes people to divorce from my
experience was resentment. And resentment can if when resentment starts,
then all the other things go. When you know, when
like if he's working really hard and making all the
(20:26):
money and I'm you know, and he resents that, you know,
I'm not contributing to that, or if I'm with like
babies crying and you know, having no sleep and I
start to resent him for being on the road and
getting eight hours of sleep or something, and resentment really
only can be cured through communication before the resentment builds.
(20:49):
And I have to say there have been a few
times when I will say to him, I'm working way
too hard and I and I need you to notice.
I think that's a great point. I haven't heard that before,
that you notice something that is making you get to
the brink of resentful and so you know the only
way out of that is to communicate. And he works
(21:11):
so hard and making sure that he is home, you know,
he's set up he operates every Monday just so that
he's home every weekend, so that way that he's always
there for games. Yeah, do you do stuff without the
kids together. Yeah, yeah, I mean, dude, we'll do trips. Yeah,
we have a we have a group of friends that
we travel with. Uh, you know, once a year, maybe
(21:36):
twice a year, depending. And then and then Rebecca and
I will we'll go out on date nights. You know,
we'll just go out to dinner. Um, I just like
to go more so now you know that the kids are,
you know, they're more independent. Yeah. If there was a
young couple who are about to be married, or thinking
about getting married, or on the fence about getting married,
(21:56):
what do you think you would want to pass on?
Nothing in life is perfect? And I think you know,
perfect is often the enemy of a very very good
and and I you know, we say that in the
operating room a lot. I just want to take out
this last piece of tumor, but it's right against something
important And if you do that, you could sacrifice all
(22:18):
the incredible work you've just been doing for the last
several hours in search of perfection. I think it's the
same thing in marriage. I mean, you know, once you've committed,
then being in search of perfection can be a destructive force.
And that's something that I think I learned and I
would pass that on and we do pinch ourselves every
(22:38):
day and just think we get really lucky. You know,
if you can internalize that, I think that's a really
powerful force. That's Sanjay and Rebecca Gupta. I can't decide
what impressed me more how nice they are or how
smart they are, but more important, they have a quiet
(22:59):
and deep understanding of each other. Now we can say
we know a doctor who makes house calls all the
way from Atlanta and brings his wife until next time.
I'm Phil Donahue and I'm Marlo Thomas. You guys have
been great. Yeah, we appreciate the conversation. It's fun. Double
(23:20):
Day is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show was
created by US and produced by Sarah Lily. Michael Bahari
is associate producer. Musical adaptations of It Had to Be
You by Stellwagen, Simfinette, Marlo and I are executive producers,
along with Mia Lobell and Letal Molad from Pushkin. Special
(23:44):
thanks to Jacob Wiseberg, Malcolm Gladwell, Heather Faine, John Snars,
Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek, Jason Gambrel, Paul Williams,
and Bruce Kluger. If you like our show, please remember
to share, rate, and review. Thanks for listening.
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