Anoush Frunjan

It's one thing to tell someone that you're Armenian.

It's a completely different thing to explain to them just how Armenian you are.

Because there are levels.

First level Armenian is, hey, I'm Armenian.

My last name ends with an I-A-N.

Yay!

Second level is, hey, I'm Armenian.

Are you going to the church picnic?

I'm going to the church picnic.

Okay, great.

We'll see you at the church picnic.

Third level is, And it's important to know where you are in all of that, whether you're by yourself or whether you're around other Armenians or whether you've been proposed to by the man of your dreams who is not Armenian.

How do you explain this to someone from Baton Rouge, Louisiana?

And let me just say, Justin knew I was Armenian from the start.

He knew from the beginning that I went to an Armenian day school, that I spoke a different language, and that I'd sometimes go to social events where people would spontaneously grab pinkies and whip handkerchiefs in the air.

But there's more.

If you walked into Holy Martyrs' Armenian Day School, which is a school that my grandmother founded, and pulled little Anoush French on the side and said, one day, you're going to marry a normal man with a normal last name, like a real American last name, like the kind that starts with an M and a C, and who knows how to do normal things like play pool and play poker, and who understands American football, she would have said, which means, what are you, crazy?

Because I still knew, even at a young age, that there's a big world out there full of people with names like Lindsay and... And who... And full of people who didn't care that Cher was Armenian.

And...

And I knew that I had to keep this all a secret in order to be safe.