Romance (2)
When was it that I first installed the Tender app…? Right. I think I was twenty-three.
A friend recommended it to me, a guy who still hadn't shed his virginity at that age, insisting that with my looks and height, even a handful of decently shot photos would be enough to rack up matches.
Determined to produce a few flattering profile pictures for Tender, I downloaded an online fashion mall app called Yushinsa for the very first time in my life.
I ordered a lineup of aggressively inoffensive clothes, squeezed myself into them, and trekked out to outdoor cafés and Han River Park, enduring swarms of gnats while striking poses… Anyway, I made a complete ass of myself in every way a man can.
Fortunately, that friend was an art student, and his eye for photography was a cut above the rest — the profile shots he took of me, casual and unposed as they seemed, still don't look tacky even now.
Decent profile photos, a towering 182 centimeters, and above all, the youthful weapon of a legal age of twenty-one — the combination was potent.
Even without paying for a premium subscription, I had roughly twenty women a day hoping to match with me.
There were men in the mix, too — on average, one or two of them sent me a 'Like♡' every single day. It genuinely startled me into wondering just how many closeted gay men this country was hiding.
At the time, I had given up on college, and my gambled-everything career as a web novelist had failed time and again. My self-esteem had already drilled through the bedrock and was knocking on the Earth's core.
So even bathed in that flood of Like♡, what I felt wasn't gratitude. It was fear.
What kind of lives did you people lead, that you could fire off a Like♡ at a worthless nobody like Han Yu-jae on sight?
Was the mindset of 'young, handsome, and tall is enough' only possible because lust had outgrown emotional loneliness?
One profile I still remember. Among the people who Liked me was a woman of twenty-six, whose handle was YoungerMenOnly♥.
Seized by a curiosity that leapt clean over our five-year age gap, I boldly returned her Like♡ and matched with her. Then I asked her this:
And YoungerMenOnly♥ replied like so:
She unmatched on the spot, and that was the end of the conversation.
Looking back, emotional loneliness weighed on me far more heavily back then than any craving to lose my virginity or find a hookup. And to a man in that state, the Tender app offered nothing but the feeling of being a penguin crash-landed in the Amazon.
That said, Tender wasn't without its positive influence on me.
All those assorted efforts I made just to put up a passable profile photo transformed twenty-three-year-old Han Yu-jae.
An eye for clean, understated clothes that never shouted for attention yet never looked sloppy. A natural expression, easy body language. It taught me these things firsthand.
Thanks to that, I won the affection of a fellow part-timer at the café where I worked, and finally pulled off the twin feats of my first relationship and shedding my virginity.
Kang Min-ji. Born in 1996. Twenty-two at the time. The benefactor who took my virginity.
When I recall our brief romance, one corner of my heart goes wistful. I really was a hopeless case back then.
Anyway — from then until I turned thirty-one, I never once opened the Tender app again.
And yet here I was, a married man, reaching for it once more.
While the app loaded, nothing remained on the screen but that lone flame logo. Staring at it, a strange competitive fire kindled in my chest.
At last, the app opened.
I was relieved to find my profile had remained fully hidden for the entire eight-year span. I'd half-worried I might have been hacked.
The photo list still held the radiant images of twenty-three-year-old Han Yu-jae. Yes — that hairstyle was what was in fashion back then.
I'd only put on a bit of middle-age spread since, so I saw no need to swap in recent pictures.
Besides, the only recent photos in my camera roll were from the wedding shoot with Chae-rin or our honeymoon. There was no way in hell I was replacing my profile with those.
I set my profile so that no one in my phone's contact list could see it, and only then did I flip it to public.
Next to the handle 'Guilty', my legal age — '30' — sat there, shameless and immovable. Facing that number, something bitter rose in my throat.
I prescribed myself the extreme remedy: I boldly subscribed to the premium plan. If I wanted to beat the young, vibrant Han Yu-jae of twenty-three, there was no other way.
Then I threw myself into profile browsing. Every swipe of the screen revealed nothing but fresh-faced women in their early-to-mid twenties.
Figures — women my own age probably avoided these apps, I thought, until I wandered into the settings and discovered a filter set to a minimum of nineteen and a maximum of twenty-five.
Apparently, twenty-one-year-old Han Yu-jae had only been willing to date up to four years older.
Hmm… how old was my wife again, legally? Born in '89, and her birthday's already passed this year, 2025 — so thirty-six.
I expanded the filter's ceiling to thirty-five.
At last, women my own age began to appear. People hunting for hookups, people seeking something serious, and even CDs (cross-dressers) and TGs (transgender women) showed up without fail.
Compared to 2017, when the occasional gay man was all you saw, the world had certainly gotten complicated.
The women with overtly sensual profiles — the ones practically broadcasting that they'd joined to sleep with a gym rat with a great body — my thumb naturally drifted past them.
Where sex alone was concerned, hadn't I already enjoyed everything there was to enjoy with Manager Hye-jeong? I was craving a meeting with a slightly different flavor.
One profile, under the starkly simple handle 'Hagong', kept snagging my eye. Was her real name Ha-young, hence Hagong?
Modesty radiated from the handle alone, and in her profile photo she was beaming.
The backdrop was a seaside where the sunset was falling beautifully, and she was not wearing a bikini that bared every line of her figure.
She wore a gauzy sleeveless dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat. That was the entirety of her profile photos.
The backlighting kept her features from coming into sharp focus, but her slender neck and wrist were unmistakable.
I sent a Like♡ to this woman of twenty-five.
An hour or so later, the notification vibration traveled up through my palm.
💕 Hagong likes Guilty! It's a match! 💕
Heart hammering, I tapped the notification and opened the app.
Ahh, adorable. At this rate, the corners of my mouth were going to launch clear into orbit.
Yes. This is the stuff. The beginning of a fresh, green romance is supposed to come packaged with exactly this kind of sweetness.
And by contrast, what had it been like with Hye-jeong? Our first time was a long, leisurely session of sex in a place that resembled a pigsty.
Chae-rin was hardly any different. She and I went straight to a love motel and got down to business on the very first day we met.
Figured as much. Her way of talking was already giving off a thick scent of someone who savored ticklish little love stories.
Honestly, I'd had a rough idea from the start. She was never going to be a menhera who binged anime, or a dopamine addict who feasted on horror flicks.
A thoroughly demure Korean woman in her mid-twenties, far removed from any pursuit of stimulation. When your listed hobbies are 'watching movies' and 'reading,' that says it all.
I launched into a precarious tightrope act without warning.
After sending that, I waited about a minute and fired off one more message.
From that point on, Hagong chattered away with boundless enthusiasm. I immediately looked up every film she mentioned on Namumitki.
The more enthusiastically I played along like that, the faster her replies came back.
Honest. Transparent. Pure. And therefore, all the more adorable.
As the conversation stretched on, a ticklish warmth spread through my chest — and it was not an unpleasant feeling at all.
On our first day matched, we talked about movies to our hearts' content; on the second day, we traded stories about our jobs.
That was very much a hollow promise. I mean, close or not, exactly when was I supposed to confess that I was serializing an adult web novel starring a married man who enjoys adulterous office sex?
On the third day, I finally brought it up.
And so it was only on the fourth day that we made plans to meet.
Since movies were what had gotten our feet in the door, our first date naturally became a trip to the cinema.
Hagong had made it her personal mission to induct me into the romance genre no matter what. Perhaps because of that, she browsed nothing but romance films for us to watch together.
At those words, I immediately opened Namumitki.
Amora. Released 2024. Directed by Sean Baker. Rerelease scheduled for October 2025 in select theaters.
Genre: Romance
'Amora, a stripper working the clubs of New York, crosses paths with a childish Russian chaebol heir…'
The genre listing clearly read 'Romance,' but the plot was decidedly not what it seemed.
The original plan for a first date with Hagong was to keep things at that ticklish, fluttering level. The second and third dates were to be equally uneventful affairs.
The idea was to quietly preserve that tender early-romance sweetness while I gauged the angles, and only once I judged that D-Day had truly arrived would I pay a visit to the little apartment where she lived alone.
Dating in your twenties is supposed to be like that. It should be miles away from the sordid kind — sleeping together on day one and stumbling straight into marriage, or carrying on an affair with your boss while you're a married man.
And yet I never imagined the very first movie we'd watch together would be quite so lewd.