Entertainment: Actor Pankaj Tripathi and his wife Mridula have been married for around 19 years now. Mridula recently appeared on a YouTube channel named Conversations with Atul, hosted by Atul Taishete. On the show, Mridula shared her struggles with her mother-in-law, who hasn’t fully accepted her due to their love marriage during a time when such unions were not widely accepted.

Mridula explained that she married Pankaj despite concerns from both families. She first met him at her brother's wedding, where Pankaj's sister was marrying her brother. As they grew closer, they worried that their relationship wouldn’t be accepted because Mridula came from a family of higher social standing.

She said, "It's still not acceptable. We aren't blood relatives, but in our culture, it is unacceptable for a woman to be married into a family of a lower stature, if another woman has already been married into a family of a higher stature. And because my sister-in-law had been married above her station into my family, I couldn't be married into their family, which was considered of a lower stature."

Pankaj, Mridula's love story

Mridula and Pankaj first developed feelings for each other when she was in ninth grade and he was in eleventh. At one point, she was almost engaged to someone else, so she decided to tell her father about Pankaj. To her surprise, he responded positively, saying, "Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I wouldn’t have wasted time looking for boys," while her mother and sister-in-law were upset.

Mridula mentioned that acceptance took time and even now some differences remain. She said, "There was a tehelka, a bawaal. Bhaabhi wasn't happy, and mom wasn’t happy. They worried about how Pankaj would take care of me. But slowly, they began to accept us." She concluded, "What can we do about it now?"

For the unversed, Pankaj and Mridula got married on January 15, 2004. In 2006, they welcomed their daughter and named her Aashi Tripathi.