Being Honest: An Introduction

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• SumoMe

Dahlia B., our newest guest contributor, ventures to be as honest as she can with her experiences on love, life and relationships. All names have been changed to protect their identity.

Let me introduce myself, if you please:

I don’t count myself as a true romantic. What can I say; I’m a product of the system, which means I’m utterly pragmatic. But I have a secret indulgence for ballads and painful love songs because isn’t that the truth? True love doesn’t have a happy ending most of the time and it makes it all the more beautiful.

Don’t judge yet, please. I’m not a bitter harpy who is past her prime nor am I a zygote with relatively trendy high-heeled shoes. I’m somewhere floating in between, clinging onto my freedom and independence. I am also seeing someone. Think of our relationship as Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, before the children and Soon-Yi came along. We’re happy living separately and also happy being together as much as we possibly can.

It’s a happy medium that we’ve come to settle on after several long years of being together. It is of course the bane of our parents that we are not married. As Asian parents it’s rather disconcerting to have grown-up children who aren’t married with children of their own. But they’re learning to deal with it due to a lack of choice. Decades ago, I would have been married off when I was 17. Now my own mother secretly tells me to travel the world and not settle down, which is very telling about how she feels about settling down herself at an early age.

I’ve never told her, but my ovaries are rather dormant and the thought of having children is the last thing on my mind.

In any case, I’ve sidetracked. I think one of the reasons our relationship works is that we both don’t ask too many questions. Or perhaps that is also the reason why I still seek trouble elsewhere.

I have too many secrets. Secrets, which I’ll never divulge, if I can help it. But under the cover of anonymity, I just might slip up.

Do I believe in love though? Of course. I’ve seen it in its various forms and it’s what binds us altogether.