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ex-fiancé was not good-looking. He was not that tall, and his square jaw and dark complexion showed that his childhood had not been an easy one. There was nothing sentimental about him. But I wasn’t expecting him to give me butterflies. I was old enough to know that when you’ve made up your mind to get married rather than keep playing the field, then that’s how it is. The first time we had met, introduced by my older brother Yusik, I asked him if he had dated a lot of women. He looked down and smiled shyly. I felt a flash of pleasure at the thought of being the first to conquer virgin soil where no others had trod. I could see why men sought out virgins. But I also knew that if I gave in and married this eligible fool who spent all of his time with his nose buried in books, my family would give me a gilded passport into the kingdom they had constructed and never again bring up my past. And when I thought about it, hedonism, self-indulgence, and debauchery—in other words, booze, sex, and other vices—were becoming clichés to me, too.
    He told me he’d had a crush on someone once.
We didn't get past the second date. I must have bored her. After that, I was too busy studying for exams. I take responsibility very seriously. For a man, it’s important to have a good job that enables you to support a family. Marriage and love are secondary; you have to make something of yourself first.
He didn’t hide the fact that he wanted to make a good impression. I thought it was cute. I said,
So, what you’re saying is that, even though you’re over thirty, this will be your first time going on a date and kissing a girl and taking her back to a hotel room? You’re a good liar.
I laughed. He looked shocked, as if he had never met a girl like me before. But I could also tell from the look in his eyes that he was not entirely repelled by feisty women likeme. In a way, it was curiosity toward a different species. It bore a trace of the longing that a hick with sunburn and a buzz cut and wearing a wifebeater—and in this case it
would
be a wifebeater and not an undershirt—can’t help but feel when he meets a girl from Seoul who is dressed in white lace socks and fancy black shoes tied with ribbons, a girl who doesn’t know the meaning of the word obedience. It was probably true. I think I even considered using him as a foothold from which to elevate my life. It was tempting, the idea that he could make a proper woman out of me. Stepping out of my dirty shoes in a muddy courtyard and placing my feet on his stepping stone, being lifted onto a clean, polished wooden porch… standing strong and balanced so the arrow can find its target. I was probably longing for exactly that.
    Because there was something a little too bashful about his smile, I assumed he wasn’t telling me the whole truth, but I did sort of fall for it. Or was it that I wanted to trust him? Was I trying to convince myself to believe him, telling myself to trust someone once more, to do whatever it took to trust someone just one last time? If I’m really honest about it, I didn’t have a problem with the fact that he had lived with a woman, and I was not some innocent virgin who had something to lose. I had lived with men as well when I was studying abroad in France. They had lasted about a month each. But even if he had abandoned her, the woman with the big rough hands that didn’t match her face, in order to marry me, the rich girl who returned from pretending to study art abroad and was nagged by her mother into holding a so-called solo exhibition and was given a full-time teaching position that she was unqualified for at a metropolitan university run by her family, I had no right to criticize him. As far as I knew, there was no reason for his actions to be all that strange or especially immoral.Everyone I knew got married the same way. But I couldn’t do it. It became clear to me that if I couldn't marry my first love–the man to whom I could not bring