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My cousin grew up in Taiwan and lived with my uncle when we were in high school. We became quite close. He and my other cousin are the closest thing to a brother that I have. He let me rent a room in his house for pretty cheap. I was thankful to have money now and a place to live. His then-wife, was a flight attendant for an Asian airline. I learned a lot about the acceptance of infidelity in Asian marriages during this time.

I neither had much luck nor any confidence to try and date, being a homeless broke ass and all.

Before I had moved in, he told me someone was looking at my facebook and wants to meet me. I didn’t think too much about it, since I had no clue who it was. Things just so happened that she is staying at his place for a few days since she was visiting LA. She was also a flight attendant. We end up meeting by “chance” one night. I say “chance” because I think my cousin sort of set it up to happen. I appreciate that he was trying to help me.

We had come back from some drinking, it was maybe 1AM.

Love at First Sight

That’s when I first saw her, she was sitting on the doorstep in the dark, smoking. I saw only her silhouette due to the lack of light, but I instantly felt it.

I think this is the one.

When we entered the house, I saw her and I was smitten. I still remember how she looked that night and the butterflies I felt. She was gorgeous. I recall being nervous, but I pretended to be normal as best I could (liquid courage, I guess). We make some chit chat, then I put my number in her phone and tell her let’s have lunch tomorrow. She was leaving the next night.

We will call her, LC.

LC didn’t call me for lunch, I was totally disappointed. I thought maybe she wasn’t into me after she met me, or maybe cause of my situation, a million different reasons.

I was planning to move in to the extra room, basically after she left. The next day I had my last background gig. It was for How I Met Your Mother, the one where NPH does this elaborate dance number at a Browns themed wedding. I watched them do this probably 50 times.

LC lived in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The airline provided an apartment for her in Hong Kong since it was based there. I bugged my cousin to tell her to contact me on Facebook or something. He said he would. Two weeks passed without any contact. I started to feel it wouldn’t happen. Then suddenly she did. I was ecstatic. She was so pretty. I loved her smile and the sound of her voice. We ended up chatting all day, every day, for the next few weeks. I thought we hit it off pretty well. She was planning to come to LA the next month. I think it was September when we had our first date in Koreatown. I found this place that made a pork neck soup that she liked. We went with my cousin and his wife at the time, who was also LC’s good friend. It all seemed so perfect.

It was still a difficult time financially for me. I was living off unemployment, which paid the rent and child support. It was hard to support dates then. My cousin would often loan me money to go out. My cousin and I have a rocky relationship at times, but I know that we have an unbreakable bond like true brothers do. We talk a lot of shit to each other, but deep down I care about him greatly. He has done a lot for me over my life, and I love him for it.

I would pick her up from her hotel near LAX, parking there was anywhere between $9-23 depending on the time. That doesn’t sound like a lot to some of you, but when your finances look like this:

Unemployment: +$1800 / month

Child Support: -$450 / month

Rent: -$500 / month

Credit Card + Cell Phone: -$250 / month

Leftover: $600 / month

That equates to a budget of $20 per day for food, gas, and whatever else.

Parking 2 or 3 times in a week, adding in dinner and movies, was a problem. I never let on that I had these issues, I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me. During the times she wasn’t in LA, I would try and save some money. I’d buy a bag of cheap dumplings from the 99 Ranch Market and eat those for a week. I’d try to stretch my dollars as best I could so I could spend it on her when she was with me. These money problems motivated me to find a job faster.

When she would come for work, I would drop her off at the hotel each night and go home.

When she came on her days off, she would stay in another spare room at my cousin’s house.

We would sometimes go to Ktown and watch Korean movies at the CGV Theater. We would eat around there, mostly KBBQ. Some nights we would stay in and watch movies on a laptop. Sort of the usual date type activities.

Officially Together and the Problems Begin

The day we were officially together was on my birthday. By then she was ok with me staying in her room, but we didn’t go past kissing. She felt it was too soon for anything else and I respected her boundaries. That night, she snuck down into the hotel cafe, got a slice of chocolate cake with a candle and surprised me.

As sad as it is to say this, it was the most thoughtful thing someone had done for me in a very long time. It really made me feel like she would treat me well and we could be happy together.

Life has a funny way of fucking with you. At first, she told me everything I wanted to hear. She was not a drinker, not a clubber, no guy friends, kind of this really good girl. I believed her, why wouldn’t I? I was the same, I hated clubs, I didn’t have any female friends, I didn’t sleep around. It seemed like a great match. But then things started changing pretty quickly. I found out via her Facebook, that right before she met me, she was here in LA visiting this other guy. They were sort of dating, although she denies it to this day (more on this later, we will call him DbagJ1). Her facebook was full of their photos. I’m talking like at least 50 photos of them together. I snooped around and looked at older photos, and saw some with what appeared to be a Korean ex bf. Hmm, strange. I figured it was before my time, so I didn’t care too much. My past wasn’t exactly a pristine one either. However, the week we are officially together, another guy (DbagJ2) posts on her wall. It was in Chinese, loosely translated to “Hey what’s up? Where have you been? When are you coming to LA, let’s hang out! What’s your number?”

Hmm. even stranger. But I decide to give her the benefit of the doubt, I’ll wait to see her response. She replies with something like “haha oh you know, just been busy traveling and stuff. Just fb msg me”

…..what the f*ck?

I had a strange feeling about this, but I was too happy at the time. I said forget it, and let it go. Bad move. Throughout our relationship, there were lots of these kind of guys, I will list them out later.

The first real trouble came pretty quickly. My cousin had a roommate, a girl whom he had known for a long time. The house had one other empty room that he was trying to rent out. The roommate’s younger sister was going to move in. Trouble. LC went ballistic, saying that the girl was only moving in because of me. I think LC envisioned late night, whip-cream bikini ambushes, and other absurd shit you only see in movies or porn. I freaked out, though, she was threatening to break up with me over this. We just got together and we were long distance. I said to myself I could understand if the situation were reversed, I would probably feel the same way. I vowed to move out on my own to resolve the issue ASAP.

I was already job hunting, a new gf motivated me to get off my ass and get a job. It came down to two offers. One was a food-delivery company, the other an online retailer giant that my cousin had referred me into via his connections. The food company required door-to-door sales, so I ended up taking the e-commerce job. Another bad move.

I got the job, started working asap so I could move. My first day was 10/24/2011. I found a guest house on craigslist that had comparable rent. I took it. It’s where I am sitting right now while typing this. I told LC, I found a place. I’m moving out! She was happy. I thought I did well. I packed up and moved in. Later I got some tax-return money and bought some furniture from Ikea. It wasn’t much, but judging where I started as a homeless, jobless, broke ass. It was progress.

LC was really good to me at times, she smuggled furniture from Asia to my place. It’s all still here too. A lamp, a stool, some rugs, a side table. It was really sweet. I did my best to treat her well, she would have to fly here two to three times a month to visit me. I had a shitty salary, and I had to pay child support. Even then, I managed to pay for most of the stuff we did when she came to visit. Food, movies, outings, etc. I figured it was the least I could do.

New Job, New Problems

With a new job comes new problems. It started with Facebook. Shortly after I started working, I made friends with everyone in my department pretty quickly. I’m pretty good with people, so that came naturally. I decided to just add them all on Facebook, instead of waiting for people to approach me or having to friend some and not others. LC freaked out; she asked why I had to friend people at all. I didn’t really have a good answer, I mean, it’s facebook. Some people friend strangers on the street, some don’t friend anyone. One particular co-worker caught her attention. She began to accuse me of having some kind of secret attraction to this person, we will call her SK.

SK would unknowingly be the bane of my existence for the next year.

I didn’t really talk to anyone from work outside of work.You can ask any of them today. But you do your normal office job stuff, team lunches, team functions, etc. The group I had joined was a tight-knit group with great camaraderie for the most part. Our company also worked with a lot of tier-one vendors in consumer goods, so occasionally we would have to attend some vendor dinners or events.

LC would accuse me of flirting with SK at work whenever she wasn’t here. Her belief was that I was some kind of Lex Luthor mastermind, plotting and planning these crazy intricate plots to spend time with SK and hiding it all from her. She would call and bitch me out for hours, calling me a terrible person. A cheat. A liar. An asshole. I would spend at least half of my work days arguing with her defending myself via text. It got to the point where she wanted to break up with me over Facebook. She was in HK at the time, being a total bitch to me. She just so happened to see DbagJ2 in HK and decided to hang out with him and some other co-workers. She told me via text that she wanted to break up. I desperately wanted to prove my innocence. I wasn’t going out like this. I told her I’d close my Facebook. I didn’t need it. I didn’t care, she was the most important thing to me. So I did. I closed it for a year. I never once secretly opened it nor did I ever want to. I didn’t have any reason to.

But then it became other things. WHY DO YOU HAVE A LINKEDIN? I closed my LinkedIn. WHY DO YOU HAVE A GOOGLE+? I hadn’t used it in years, so I closed that, too. It became a witch hunt. She once Googled me and some scam site that aggregated social media pages pulled my old MYSPACE page from around 10 years ago. She saw it and flipped out. She accused me of using all these things secretly to talk to SK. I was at a loss. I rationalized it because LC had been cheated on before. I thought I could slowly make things better as time went on. It never did.

She was like a Google super sleuth. I have to admit, she found the most inane shit you could imagine on the internet. Each time she found something, she would act like she had discovered a new species. She would always do this smug interrogation. Like she was toying with me. Drop these vague hints about something, and each time I had no idea what it was. In hindsight, I guess perhaps she was fishing to see if I would confess to something else instead.

It got pretty complicated. The trust became non existent and it felt like we were in the manga Death Note. It became this crazy game of cat and mouse to her. I once caught a glimpse of her phone and she had 30 browser windows open. Each one was a different girls’s Facebook page from my company. She would regularly refresh them all and check to see if I would appear. [Cue creepy Gone Girl music]

To Lie or Not to Lie?

Now, I am a pretty reasonable person. I understand that I did some things to make her feel a certain way. However, guys get stuck in this dilemma sometimes: You end up doing something that is totally harmless, but you know your partner is going to shit bricks. What do you do? Do you be honest and tell them? Or do you just let it pass without saying? I constantly struggled with this. Women will always say “Tell me the truth, I’d rather know”. Then murder you when you do tell the truth. Then when you decide, “well it was totally harmless, I just won’t say” and she finds out, you get murdered even worse.

One particular incident really created an issue for her. There was a time when Samsung people came to visit our offices. They had planned for a dinner afterwards, I had done everything in advance to weasel out of the dinner. I had my car repaired that day so I could leave early to pick it up. I had already gotten the confirmation that I wasn’t required to attend the dinner.

However, I did have to do a presentation for the visitors on behalf of our department and I killed it. They liked me and wanted me to attend the dinner. And of course along with SK. I was sweating like crazy, I damn near chewed my fingers off. I frantically tried to find a way out, but my boss gave us the instructions to attend on her behalf. FML.

I’m stuck, do I lie and say SK didn’t go? Or tell her the truth and face the wrath? She would for sure blame me and accuse me that I somehow masterminded this to happen. I didn’t know what to do. (This is where the story is different between me and her. I am not a liar, so I remember telling her that I had to go to the dinner. She claims that I did not tell her. I honestly can’t remember who is right.)

I would ultimately confess that I had to go to this dinner at my boss’ orders. SK went, we carpooled. I was so uncomfortable the entire time, stressing out about how I would tell her about this turn in events. We went to Lawry’s at LA Live and had a fancy dinner. Most of us ended up sitting there like furniture because our CEO showed up. He did all the talking, we just sat there with fake smiles on our faces. Afterwards, SK took me back to my car, I went home. Pretty uneventful and harmless.

Now, I’m sure in LC’s head it all played out like a Korean romance drama: the stars are shining brightly, it rains somehow and we only have one umbrella, all kinds of cliché shit. She had quite the imagination. (Yeah, none of it happened.)

But I will admit, I didn’t tell her the truth in the beginning about this. That was my fault, and probably contributed to her lack of trust in me. Still, it was a damned if I do, damned if I don’t situation. What could I have done differently? Tell my boss I’m not going? Sure, maybe I could have. But seeing as how I was the new guy and my boss was friends with my cousin, I couldn’t disrespect her.

That’s why from then on, I did everything I could to prevent these problems. But at the same time, she was doing more shady shit than I was. That bothered me. In year one, the two Dbags I mentioned above would be persistent problems.

DbagJ1

This was the the guy she sort of dated before me. She claims they were just friends, like bffs. But she told me this story in so many lies, it drastically changed over time. I later became sort of friends with this guy’s cousin and asked him about it. He told me quite honestly, he felt like they were dating. I agreed.

As I previously mentioned, when we first got together, her Facebook was full of photos of her and this guy. She never once put our photos up that I can remember. She claims she did once, but I never saw it. I found out later that this guy still reached out to her via text. They would still talk, secretly. Whatever, I didn’t care too much.

Until one night, we went to a nearby movie theater. We were going to see the latest James Bond movie, I think it was Skyfall. The theater was empty as we walked in, except for a guy and a girl sitting in the middle of the theater. It was DbagJ1. LC’s jaw dropped. To the floor. She stood there, staring at him in silence for about a minute. He saw her, said hi and acted normal. I was following behind LC, she had her back to me the entire time. She never mentioned me, or introduced me. She just stood there with a deer in headlights look. I finally introduced myself, shook hands, then sat down. After a short chat, they leave. She sits down and looks at me in disbelief. I was irked she didn’t introduce me, but whatever, I didn’t bring it up. Basically she spends the entire movie asking me: “Can you believe it? Can you believe we ran into him?”. I just shrug it off every time and try to watch the movie. It gets to the point where, we are back at my place after the movies, and she is STILL asking me. I finally break, “So what? What are you saying? Like it’s fate or something and you should be with him?”. She gets offended and we fight. I still don’t know what happened in that movie.

Throughout our relationship, she secretly still talked to him. I only know this cause later I would check her phone or she would send me snippets of their convos. They would talk shit about me, he would talk shit about me, and tell her my company is “an orgy”. Then he has the fucking nerve to ask for help getting a job there. I tried to help him, but he was too shitty to even get an interview. I secretly wanted him to work there, so he could see the horrors of that fucking place. To this day, they are still friends. He also lives a few blocks away from me.

I had tried to make friends with this guy when he was trying to get a job, but he didn’t really reply to my emails. I figured it was easier to talk shit about me when he didn’t know me.

DBagJ2

This guy was also a flight attendant, based out of LA. I would later find out that 90% of male flight attendants are gay, and the rest are douche bags trying to sleep with the women FAs. This guy was a total douche. He would run into her on flights and ask her out. She would say she has a bf, he wouldn’t care. He would say “so what?”. I only met him once, I saw him at the airport when I was sending her off. After that, I wasn’t worried about him anymore. Lol. Fucking ugly, troll-looking dude. I remember telling LC, if you leave me for that guy, I wish you luck. The issue I had was with LC more than anything. He would keep messaging her on Facebook and hitting on her while she had no reaction. She would never say STOP, or FUCK OFF. One time he was flirting with her on a flight and was touching her face or some shit, and I asked her what was her reaction? Nothing.

Like, really? You chastise me for fake romances you dreamed up, and here is some guy flirting with you and it’s whatever? It was blatantly disrespecting me. Ugh. I think she is still friends with this guy currently.

I can’t stand people like this, people who have no morals or respect for relationships. They pretend to be friends with girls, just waiting for a chance at vulnerability. It’s the lowest of the low and I have no respect for people like this.

Ex BF #1

I later found out that her very first ex boyfriend was still in touch with her. He would randomly send her “Where u at?” texts. This was her first boyfriend from high school and they were supposedly perfect together. Except he cheated on her and she caught him in the act. She would later say I was a way worse person than him (WTF?). He was like “family” to her now. I don’t get how that works, at all. It’s so convenient for women to say “Just a friend”. She would also tell me that he was now married with a kid, but still texts her that she was the one that got away. He still wanted to hook up or something, she would deny it. She would consider no reply the same as telling someone to FUCK OFF. Women, it’s not the fucking same. Please learn to say “I’m not interested”. It’s not that fucking hard, especially if you have a bf/husband. I am pretty sure she still talks to him currently.

There were a couple of incidents where she would provoke this guy to message her. Sort of like leaving breadcrumbs. One particular incident, she was in Taiwan. She said she needed to get some contact lenses or something. She claimed the ONLY place she could get it, was one particular store that her ex bf owned. She assured me it wouldn’t be a problem, she would get in and get out with it. I questioned her claims that she couldn’t get this anywhere else. I was powerless to stop her, and of course it went exactly as I thought. The guy working there recognized her and told her ex bf. He called/texted her right after he found out she had visited.

Korean ex BF

I don’t know how much contact she had with him, I never got to see what her email inbox looked like. But I caught wind that they would still have contact via email sporadically. She would say they were just “friends”. They had dated a number of years in Canada. She was there for college and that’s when they were together. She would always say that, to her, being together as students is the most romantic thing. Add on that he was Korean and they had a sort of kdrama romance, it wasn’t difficult to see this was her most loved person. Later they would break up because she thought he was messing around with another girl. I didn’t ask too much about this guy.

She once told me stories about how she would go see this Korean ex bf while she was dating this other guy, boyfriend #3. She would do it to torment the poor guy. Bf #3 was very upset she did this but she would continue. She would tell him to call the Korean guy’s phone if he needed her. I told her that she was fucked up for doing that, and I felt sympathetic to that ex bf of hers.

Year one was filled with constant accusations, breakups to makeups, fighting and drama. We probably broke up and made up at least 30 times.

SK’s Wedding

During this first year, SK got engaged and was going to get married. At the time, we were on good terms as far as coworkers. She had mentioned to someone she needed a wedding photographer among other things. My cousin and his wife were wedding photographers as well as many of their friends. I told her about this and she asked me for info. I passed along my cousins contact info and let them discuss the rest.

My rationale was, two people I knew needed something and each could fulfill the other’s need. Win-win, right? SK could get her photographer, my cousin could make some money. LC didn’t think so. She thought I planned this out so that I could get invited to the wedding. How that makes any sense is beyond me. SK did invite me but also most of the people in our department. I didn’t go, of course.

Fast forward to Halloween, my wedding photographer cousin and wife decide to come up for Halloween Horror Nights. LC and I join them. At one point, they talk about SK’s wedding and things. I tried to deflect the topic, my cousin’s wife mentions SK looked very pretty in her wedding dress, I didn’t say anything. LC gave me daggers from her eyes. I knew I was in for some shit and for no good reason. When we were alone, she would berate me and say I was supposed to say something like SK was not pretty at all. It boggled my mind. Needless to say, that outing was not a fun one.

It was just one sample among many that demonstrated how things were during our first year.

Continue Reading – Chapter 7 – The Ex Gf – Year 2