I love u [my fullname including surname]
There are guys that are so dim-headed that even if you always come to their side with just one text message or even spend almost 95% of your waking hour with them, they will still have no idea that you are interested in them.
There are guys who have incredibly low self-esteem that they cannot fathom the idea that any girl will be interested in them, so they back-out from the courting process even when the girl is practically begging for their attention.
And then there are guys who are just so incredibly dense that they cannot sense that a girl is not interested in them at all, unless she actually starts physically running away from them.
I have this neighbor – we’ll call him GuyNextDoor – who can sometimes be so creepy, he is practically bordering on stalker-ish. GuyNextDoor was about a few years older than me, a professional bum (aka jobless and almost in his 30’s) who spent 95% of his time posting various rants about the local government and the entertainment industry by posting multiple bulletins in his Friendster. He and I have known each other almost all our lives. Since I do not hang out with the other kids nor am I active in the youth organizations around our village unlike most of my siblings, I do not really have a lot of close friends of the opposite sex within our neighborhood. But eversince my brother started playing basketball with the other boys in our neighborhood, GuyNextDoor and my brother became quite close.
One day, I found an add request from him through my Friendster. Despite the fact that we never actually had any face-to-face conversation (except for the occasional nods of recognition whenever he would politely open our gate for me whenever I come home from school while he and my brother were playing basketball at the half-court infront of our house) I figured, What the heck, I know him anyway, so, I added him up. And then he started sending me messages.
GuyNextDoor: Why “It’s Complicated”? (referring to my Friendster status)
Mistress: I have a boyfriend but like I said, it’s complicated (like I really was going to start narrating my lovelife to a complete stranger. Ano siya, feeling close?)
GuyNextDoor: Okay. I think you and I are alike. I would love to get to know you.
Mistress: Uhhh… What do you mean?
GuyNextDoor: I read your profile and saw your pics. I think you’re a very interesting person. Me, what you see is what you get. I really don’t care what other people think of me.
Mistress: Uhhh… okay.
GuyNextDoor: I love you [my full name including surname]
Mistress: You don’t even know me that well and you’re telling me you love me?
GuyNextDoor: I just know. I love you so much.
Mistress: (logs out from Friendster)
He started making comments on my photos (stuff like, you are so beautiful, etcetera). I simply ignored it. The next time, he e-mails me again asking for my number. I think I was completely inebriated that time so I actually gave it to him. He then started texting me more creepy messages.
GuyNextDoor: Hi.
Mistress: Hello.
GuyNextDoor: I mis seeing u arnd.
Mistress: Iv bin bz w skul.
GuyNextDoor: I thnk ur vry beutful.
Mistress: Uh… tnx.
GuyNextDoor: I love u [my full name including surname]
Mistress: U dont evn kno me.
GuyNextDoor: I stil love u.
Mistress: (turns off her cellphone)
He then starts texting me more and more I-love-you messages and even miscalling me. I continued ignoring it. He kept sending me more I-love-you messages through my Friendster and still I ignore it. He even posts the complete lyrics of some love song to my Friendster profile, which of course, got all my friends clicking on his profile to see who is the mysterious guy professing his love for me in complete view of the general public. Still, I ignored him. Whenever we would cross paths around the neighborhood, with me, usually hurrying up to catch a ride for school and him, in his motorcycle, he would always stop his motorcycle and talk to me.
“Hi,” GuyNextDoor smiles.
“Hello,” I said, still walking hurriedly.
“You don’t reply back to my messages.”
“I have no load.” I was lying. I’m always subscribing to Globe UnliTxt everyday.
“I see….”
“I’m kind of in a hurry. I’ll be late for class.”
“Okay. See you around. Take care.”
“Thanks.”
And then he texts me again while I’m already on my way to school, and I am obliged to text back because he just saw me buy load at the nearby sari-sari store. The same thing happens, of course, when he starts telling me he loves me. I would not care to reply back anymore, despite his 3-5 miss calls.
I don’t know. Maybe he just doesn’t have a clue. Maybe my being polite misleaded him to thinking it was a sign of interest. Maybe he’s just incredibly dense that he doesn’t realize I do not want to have anything to do with him. Or maybe he’s deluded himself into thinking that he is a perfectly great catch.
Yeah, maybe, that’s it.
Still Searching for TheDancer
Because everybody I know has a Friendster account, one of the first persons I tried to search through Friendster’s search engine was an ex-boyfriend of mine from college whom I haven’t seen eversince I broke up with him during the last time I was at the big city.
TheDancer. The guy I broke up with before I started dating Rockstar.
I think he’s the only person I know who probably doesn’t own a Friendster account.
All my attempts to search for him through Friendster have failed. I even tried searching for him through Multiply and nothing. I figured, he wasn’t much of a computer savvy in college anyway – seeing as I had to frequently help him out with encoding his case presentations in simple Microsoft Word – but come on! It doesn’t take computer savvy to make a Friendster account, for God’s sake! I even came so far as to Google him but the only significant result I got was a list from the Professional Regulation Commission of those who passed the licensure exam for our old college course about a year after he graduated.
At least, now I know he’s finally passed his board exams.
Unfortunately, it only confirms that he has totally disappeared off my life and does not wish to be found.
I missed TheDancer. He was the first of the many players who traipsed in and out of my life. He was the first of the not-so-serious boyfriends I ever had. He was the first of the guys who treated me like crap but I continued seeing because there was nobody else around. He was the first of the guys I dated but knew I would never actually end up marrying.
He was also my first.
But that’s another story. LOL…
TheDancer and I met during my last month of internship at some rehabilitation center in Novaliches. He hailed from a private college just some distance from my own university. He was short, well-built, very masculine and cute when he grinned in that boyish mischievous way of his. It wasn’t love at first sight really. He frequently hung out with this other co-intern, ClosetKing, and one of my other co-interns, Fruity, had a crush on TheDancer. She displayed this in the most childish way possible: by constantly picking arguments with him. This did not do well with him, of course, as he ended up being frequently annoyed with her.
Our last day of rotation at the said rehabilitation, all the interns agreed on catching a movie together. TheDancer and I ended up sitting together, our elbows sharing one armchair. Sometime in the middle of the movie, our hands, which were initially hanging loosely an inch away from each other, brushed.
I ignored it. I figured it was an accident. A couple seconds later, I felt his pinkie brush against mine again. Still, I ignored it. But I didn’t move my hand away from his. And then he repeated it again.
I briefly looked at him from the corner of my eye. He was intently watching the movie.
So this time, I brushed my pinkie against his.
His expression never changed. But he brushed his pinkie against mine in return, this time a little longer than he’s supposed to.
I think I smiled.
Somehow, he ended up holding my hand during the rest of the movie. And we did all this with none of our friends ever noticing. There would definitely be a lot of teasing if anybody actually noticed it and we both did not want that. Plus I did not want to have Fruity thinking I was an Anaconda and stole her man. We separated as soon as the movie ended and the lights came on.
That same night, he texted me and told me he liked me. I told him I liked him too. Ergo, kami na (we’re going steady). Because he apparently didn’t want ClosetKing asking him a lot of irritating questions, he told me we should keep it on the down low whenever ClosetKing was around.
Which turns out to be almost all of the time as ClosetKing and TheDancer seemed to be practically joined at the hip.
At one time, ClosetKing, TheDancer and I practically got engaged in this severely complicated game of walking through the various streets and back alleys of Malate just to lose ClosetKing who was adamant in trying to join us. TheDancer it seems didn’t have the heart to tell him to bug off and he didn’t want to go off into a long explanation as to why he wanted to be with me alone, without ClosetKing’s company. ClosetKing must have noticed that I was spending a lot of time with TheDancer so he texted me if TheDancer was courting me. I told him no. He said that’s good because he was interested in me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him no so I just said I’m very flattered but I think we were better off as friends. I told TheDancer about the whole incident and he laughed his head off.
It seems that ClosetKing, who has been his bestfriend for the past few years, is infact inlove with him.
So, ClosetKing is gay.
Okay… that explained a lot.
So I played along with the entire charade between ClosetKing and TheDancer, letting ClosetKing think believe that I know he liked me too, being okay with TheDancer and I not letting ClosetKing know that we were dating. Often times, I would meet him after his duty at the hospital and we would avoid not being seen by ClosetKing together.
It was a really weird time of my life but ClosetKing was fun and flirty and was not complicated to be with so I stayed. He wasn’t as affectionate as I would’ve wanted to. He preferred being held by the elbow rather than by the hands. He was arrogant, a little bossy and was occasionally moody. We talked a lot on the phone and because I didn’t own one and he did, I frequently can be seen heading to a nearby public pay phone with my purse of P5 coins just to chat with him about his studies and making him answer hypothetical questions about our relationship. Because I owned a cellphone and he didn’t, I frequently had to be content with him sending me text messages from various unregistered numbers telling me to meet him somewhere and even waiting for him once for three hours at a McDonalds’ because he never actually got my reply at all. Because he lived one bus ride away from the big city, we didn’t see each other as often as I would’ve wanted and often times I had to entice him to head to the big city by telling him I was treating him for a movie and dinner which of course, I ended up paying for (Darn cheapskate that TheDancer!). Despite the fact that he had a temper, we rarely fought because whenever I would try to open up about certain incident that had made me annoyed with him, he had this way of making me laugh and forget about it before I even started telling him why I was angry in the first place.
He wasn’t the love of my life but I loved him, in one of those crazy I-don’t-know why ways.
When I finally told him that I was leaving the big city to finally go back home, he surprised me by saying the sweetest words I have ever heard come out of his mouth:
“If things were different and we were at an age when we could be more independent to make our own decisions, you [mistress] could have been the woman I would’ve thought of wanting to spend the rest of my life with.”
Such perfect timing. And he decides to tell me this just as I was about to leave the big city and return back at an indefinite period of time.
In all the seven months that we were together, he couldn’t even find the courage to tell me he loved me.
Arghhh, damn men! You all want what you can no longer have.
Why My Friends Should Never Set Me Up
HottestMama - not to be confused with HotMama, because Hottest is so much hotter - was an old classmate of mine from highschool who has been my favorite gimik buddy and partner in crime for the recent past few years.
Before she got herself pregnant and ended up getting married, that is.
When I told her that I had been recently seeing a married man, her married sensibilities were horribly offended and thus, she took it upon herself to set me with someone else. Pronto! She then decided to text a friend of her husband, SomeGuy, whom she has been wanting to set me up with for quite some time.
Hottest Mama: Hey SomeGuy! Dis s d prfct tym to start txtn [mistress]
SomeGuy: Y?
Seriously guys, if you are single and you wanted to meet girls, never ask the person who wants to set you up with her WHY you should go out with her friend. It’s a buzzkill. Do you even have to ask? It’s not as if she’ll actually want to set you up with someone really bad. Are you gay? Do you not want to meet someone special? Don’t you even want to get laid? If you weren’t interested in meeting someone new, just say so. Simple English never hurt anyone.
Seeing that SomeGuy was a no-show, she decided to tap the testosterone pool in her workplace and finally aimed in a winner at a guy we’ll call TheNurse. Not as hot as HotNurse but a nurse still.
The guy started texting me and I found out we both came from the same highschool, only he was two years younger than I was, he came from a family of nurses (like 89.99% of people in this darn country), he regularly watches the same cheesy girly-girly soap opera as I did and he used to go to the gym regularly but has stopped, hence he is now frequently teased by co-workers because he apparently resembled the protagonist in Kung Fu Panda.
And while we’re at it, if a girl tells you that, “Hey! I haven’t seen that movie yet but I’ve wanted to watch it,” and you know very well that said movie is showing at movie theaters, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that she wants you to ask her if she’d like to watch the movie with you. Get a clue, for God’s sake.
But I disgress.
TheNurse didn’t exactly text me as much as I would have wanted him to in order to ensure me that he was definitely interested. But all in all, despite the fact that TheNurse wasn’t a great text conversationalist, I did find a few common interests so I mentally filed him as a “Maybe” in my mental file folder of guys I might consider going out with in the future if they asked me.
Now, like everything else in this country, dating nowadays utilizes two very important tools: texting and the Internet, or Friendster in particular. As my profile was private, he then asked me to add him up into my friends list so that he can view my complete profile and browse through my pictures. I did so the next day.
And then he just disappeared off the face of my inbox.
I didn’t hear from him anymore.
I started thinking, what the f**k? Was he intimidated by all the things I’ve written in my profile? Or maybe he thought I wasn’t pretty enough. I don’t think I looked that bad in my pictures. I actually looked fantastic in most as I tried to post only those which showed my good sides. The only ones who seemed dubious were those that were uploaded by a good friend which I just couldn’t find the heart to delete even if I looked like crap because I didn’t want to hurt my friend’s feelings if she noticed that I didn’t post them.
I started becoming insecure about my looks. I looked at my photos and began finding fault in every picture.
This picture makes me look fat.
This one makes me look like I just woke up.
This shows my chubby cheeks.
This one, I just look average and boring.
And then I clicked on HIS profile and saw him. The 1”x1”-sized default pic that was so blurred it was probably taken using an old 1 megapixel cameraphone, the numerous pictures shared with about 30 others of his highschool classmates probably taken 10 years ago, making his face look the size of a sesame seed, the only clear picture of him showing him with three other friends probably taken 5 years ago when he was still regularly going to the gym as he seemed to still look very much in shape, the stupid idiotic childish things he wrote in his profile that would have been funny for me, if I was still in highschool, that is.
And I felt better.
It wasn’t such a loss after all.
The Man Who Broke Me
I once had that someone and his name was DevilIncarnate.
Okay, kidding.
I call him Rockstar.
Rockstar was 23 years old, a year older than I was when we first met. He wasn’t that tall but he was well-built, a very talented guitar player who was the youngest in his family. We met at a rehabilitation center where we both volunteering. He wasn’t flirty at first, probably because I still had a boyfriend, albeit long-distance, when we first met. But when I announced that I had finally broken up with that boyfriend, Rockstar usurped on the first good opportunity that he saw. I needed help purchasing a certain DVD for my friend’s bachelorette party and he offered to accompany me. So he picked me up at home and together, we flogged down our embarassment (okay, we were trying to get some porn for the party) and was able to get ourselves some Class A hard-core porn through some local travelling salesmen who sell pirated DVDs. We started texting each other after that, talking more on the phone and before the month ended, he and I were a couple.
It was really fun at first. Despite him being wise in the ways of casual dating, I was his first serious girlfriend so I trained him on the ways of a true boyfriend-girlfriend relationship – the holding hands, the proper positioning of the body when sitting together, the naughty play of words, the expected and unexpected kisses. He was a quick study and soon he was showing me romantic places to dine in, inviting me to lunch with his family, showering me with flowers just because, hanging out at his house after my class, bringing me food at every opportunity. He loved me and never tired of telling me that he was incredibly lucky to have me. He made feel so adored with such fervor that at times I felt that he was choking me with his affection. I found myself wanting to break free, unable to cope up with his expectations, disappointing him so many times for simply being who I am until I started to lose sight of who I am and became forcibly molded into who he thinks I should be.
And oh, how I rebelled.

I started telling male friends whom I just recently met that I was single. I started sneaking out to meet my friends from school without telling him. I started to learn how to drink, to smoke again, to do the things I knew I wanted to experience while was still in my youth. Almost everything he had forbidden me to do, I did. He hated my friends so I snuck out to meet with them. He was jealous of my male bestfriends from highschool and forbid me to stay in touch with them, so I continued texting with them behind his back. But at the end of the day, after a thousand angry text messages and fights over the phone, I feel overcome by guilt and remember that he loved me so much. So I ended up with my tail between my legs, confessing everything to him and vowing never to do it again.
Until the next opportunity came and I once again succumb to it.
If I might have come across as a bad girlfriend, you’re wrong. I swear that I wasn’t. I really did my best to be the person he wanted me to be, to the point that I no longer had any close friends to talk to except for him. I was pulling myself away from my bestfriends and my family and I was so miserable that I tried to drown that mysery with the next closest thing: food. I gained so much weight that I eventually lost my self-confidence, started believing that he is the only person who will ever love me now, began missing a lot of the things that were happening around me, yearning for the opportunity to be who I really am, became desperate for more attention and spiraled more into depression.
And we fought a lot.

I tried to be that woman, but I failed miserably.
He must have been miserable too because he cheated, not once, not twice, but thrice if my memory was right. Our first month together, he slept with a hooker. I forgave him, thinking, I can’t really blame him since he wasn’t getting any from me then. A few months later, he started courting some girl who worked in the same hospital that we were both volunteering in. The girl turned him down so that didn’t progress the way he would have wanted to. His frequent excuse was that I made him so mad because of the things that I did despite him forbidding me that it forces him to cheat with other women just to get back at me. He made me feel like it was my fault, so once again, I forgave him. I can’t remember the rest of the girls he cheated with, except for one, which I will talk about much later in this post.

In my heart, I knew my parents will never agree to my marrying at such an early age, especially when I wasn’t even halfway to finishing medical school. I knew them well enough to know that there is no chance in hell that they will actually say yes. In my heart, I secretly hoped that they wouldn’t agree to it. It was my way out of the engagement. I was a coward, yes, but I needed them to tell him so I didn’t have to be the one who will hurt his feelings.
My parents certainly did not disappoint.
The summer wedding was cancelled. And I was free. For the meantime.

Until he told me about the younger girl he had been seeing, a minor, whom he had been sleeping with behind my back for the past two months.
It was the last straw that finally broke me.
The thing is, if you betray me as a boyfriend, I can understand that, because I might have pushed you to do so being the not so perfect girlfriend. But if you betray me as a friend, then I can’t forgive you. The past two weeks after we broke up, he continued flirting with me, messing my mind up that I didn’t even give myself the chance to mourn for the 2 ½ years that we have been together and had now lost. He made me believe that there was still a chance that we might get back together soon. I agreed to be friends with him even if I didn’t really think it was healthy for both of us. I never asked him for anything except for the promise that we would tell each other once we started seeing other people, so that the other person can move on.
He betrayed that trust, in so many ways imaginable, and I hated him so much.
I barraged him with e-mails of hate and desperation. I even barraged the other girl’s Friendster with scornful messages. Rockstar always brought out the worst in me, and he was still doing it, even after we had broken up. He begins threatening me that he’ll sue me for the hateful e-mails. I didn’t care. I wanted them to feel as miserable as I did. I didn’t want to be the only one feeling the pain.
I wanted to bring them down with me.
It took me two weeks before I stopped crying in my bedroom and burying my sobs among the pillows. It took several months before I could say that I was finally okay. Longer still for me to want to go into another serious relationship again. Rockstar and I never crossed paths again, at least, not face to face, although there were times when I saw him around town. He has a 3-year-old child now with the same girl, but they never married and he was still jobless apparently.
When it comes to my views regarding love, I was never the same person after that. I had become jaded, a little hardened, wiser (if I say so myself) but so much stronger.
I don’t regret ever having met him. I would like to think, if not him, I was bound to meet someone like him in my life anyway. I do hope that he had forgiven me, for I have long forgiven him. For now, I simply choke it all up to experience, just a part of what made me who I am now.
Finding Out About His Wife
I found out about Philip’s wife by accident. I told a gay friend of mine, Georgia, that he and I have been seeing each other. He was happy for me, since it had been quite some time since he saw a certain twinkle in my eye, but he told me to be careful. He wasn’t sure though but an old friend of his came from the same hometown as Philip. Like any other small hometown where everybody knows everybody’s business, it was no secret that he had a wife. I was flabbergasted, shocked that he had the nerve to do this to me but at the same time, I wanted to give Philip the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I was hoping he and the wife had separated. Maybe I was hoping that Georgia was just a mean gossip, jealous of my own happiness. Maybe I was hoping that it wasn’t true. So I kept the information tucked at the back of my mind, continued seeing Philip, pretending as if I didn’t know.
Oh, yes, there were times I wanted to broach the topic with him. A few times, I joked with him to greet his three wives for me. That had always been my style, to hide under the humor, the half-meant jokes, and the veiled laughter. I refused to face facts, hated confrontations and preferred pretending that reality doesn’t exist.
I was contented to live in my own perverted version of reality.
Until the day his wife requested to add me through my Friendster.
My Friendster profile is private. Before anybody can view my complete profile, he/she had to request for my permission. I have decided to keep my profile private because of certain people from my past that I wanted to stay away from. When I first saw Midge on the request list, I didn’t think much of it. I thought of her as probably a girl from my gradeschool days who remembered me or a friend of a friend. Imagine my surprise when I clicked Midge’s pic and saw her with Philip and their one-year-old son.
I could have walked away from my laptop then. Walk away and pretend I didn’t saw anything. One click and I could have pretended Philip was still the same person I first knew. But somehow, I found myself reluctantly attracted to the photos, clicking their pictures together one by one, like a show I couldn’t get myself to stop watching.
At the end of the day, I could no longer deny the truth.
I HAD BEEN SEEING A MARRIED MAN.

