A Seoul Love Story

The summer of 2012 will always be synonymous with one memory for me: falling in love. It was on those everlasting, humid nights in northern Seoul that I fell in love with Ahyoung. Now here I sit, three weeks away from our wedding, reading over the journal I kept. I thought it was a perfect time to tell our story.

I fell in love with Ahyoung when she had a different name. At that time she was Kayla, her English work name. I started to develop a crush on Kayla at our first staff dinner. All the kindergarten teachers went to a barbeque restaurant in Yeonsinnae. I ended up across the table from her. I knew she was a beautiful girl, but I knew nothing about her personality. She blew me away there and then. She was social, open-minded and a great conversationalist. She was extremely warm-natured and had an infectious positivity to her. I was hooked.

The next three months we had limited contact. She was doing a TESOL course and would race out of school to take the subway to class every night. I was limited to time at school. A part of our jobs as kindergarten teachers was to make class trips to the bathroom. I would strategically take my class at the same time as hers, just to get a two minute chat in. We would playfully talk as the kids peed and we helped them wash their hands.

Our first picture together

It was like a bolt of lightning down my back every time I saw her. Her perfectly-shaped, light-brown eyes that had a little squint to them when she smiled. The way her dark, flowing hair fell over her ears with that one innocent, single strand falling down her sideburns. There was a connection that floored me every time we talked.

All this while, I knew I was going to be leaving Korea early. I had applied to Bachelor of Education programs before I started the job. I found early on that I’d got in to University of Toronto, my top school. I accepted the offer and would be starting in September. Our time was limited.

But things started to heat up when the time clock was running. I noticed that at work it wasn’t always just me making eyes with her. Sometimes I would look up and she would be looking my way. Then one day she came up to me during our bathroom break: “Do you want to go out for dinner Wednesday?” she asked.

I was dumbfounded and gave a goofy, “sure!!” Though the dinner was not quite what I framed it to be. It wouldn’t be just us, there would be a group of coworkers. This started a trend.

Two years later, our engagement shots in Seoul

July mostly proceeded like this. We would go out for drinks in Hongdae, go out for pig’s feet dinners and drink coffee in her hometown Ilsan, all with friends. I would playfully flirt with her.

I would text her on my old school flip phone, sometimes spending 15 minutes just to send a single message in Korean. I would text that I wanted to spend more time with her alone. She would text back something like: ‘I see… it’s really humid out tonight!” She knew how to play me.

In August things began to change. We had a school holiday the first week of the month. I was going to Beijing with a group of teachers. She was going to New York to visit family. We sat in the coffee shop and went over a map of New York before she left.

I walked her to her bus stop. We were just hanging out. She had told me how public affection was not socially acceptable in Korea. I ignored that. I went in for an unexpected kiss on the cheek. It was sloppy and landed somewhere near her eye. I felt somewhat accomplished.

I thought of her the whole trip in Beijing. She became the first thing on my mind when I woke up in the morning and the last thing I thought of before I went to sleep. I would sometimes wake up in fits of restlessness thinking about her. She occupied 90% of my mental capacity. It seemed my single purpose in life was to fell the splashes of sunlight from seeing her laugh.

When we returned, things got feverish. We began to ‘date’. We had our first true kiss when she showed me the music video ‘Gangnam Style’ on her phone (haha… you can’t make that one up). I started to meet important friends and family in her life.

Our final days together were drama ridden. We went out for goodbye drinks with friends on my last night. She said she was going to go home. I foolishly didn’t act on this and she left alone. I found her by the bus stop crying. She told me that if I didn’t understand her there, how could I understand her from overseas? We breifly argued. I told her that I wanted to kiss her. She said she didn’t care if people were watching and she was breaking customs.

The next morning we met for breakfast. We came to a clear conclusion: we decided that we were going to try to make it work. She wanted to do some travelling the next year was thinking of visiting Canada.

And with that, I will leave off on a note that I wrote on August 30, 2012 before my flight at Incheon Airport:

“I’m not quite sure what this all means yet. I’m not sure how this will all translate back to Canada. It seems a little crazy, but I told her in all honesty, that I could see her being my wife. I truly feel that way. There’s some level of chemistry, comfort and understanding that’s there. But most of all it just feels right.”