"Teacher, I love you!"

New relationships, always fraught with the potential for awkward situations, can be even more uncomfortable in Korea. I’ve seen multiple Western couples cornered by a Korean (be he a friend, acquaintance or total stranger) and asked,
“Do you love her?” (sometimes emphasized with a little heart shape made with the thumbs and index fingers), and
“When you get married?”
“Well, we just met a few weeks ago, so…”
A friend who’s been here for a while put it quite nicely: “Korea loves couples.” I mean, the hallmark of a committed couple is that they dress in matching unisex outfits. My favorite is the matching underwear sets in lingerie store windows. Yikes.

For native English teachers, there’s no escape during the work day. Students pepper me and my compatriots with weekly questions about the status of our love lives.
“Teacher, you have a boyfriend?”
“No, I don’t have a boyfriend.”
The very next week: “Teacher, you have boyfriend now?”
“No, and I don’t think I would tell you if I did.”
I could just make something up to get them off my back while keeping some semblance of privacy about my personal life, but I’m not sure I have the energy to create the exceedingly detailed fictional boyfriend that would be necessary to satisfy all of the questioning that would undoubtedly follow. To be fair, there are also plenty of inappropriate questions/comments that come from Westerners, but they’re usually the ones who’ve been in Korea for a while and have presumably lost some of their sense of propriety (if they ever had one). Privacy is not an expectation in Korea. I must find a productive way of dealing with this.

I can only speak from the point of view of a Westerner, of course, but I can’t help thinking Koreans must feel the same way to some extent. Koreans never really live on their own, staying in their parents’ home until they are married, when they may or may not still live with one of the spouses’ parents. Several generations often live under one roof, upping the number of all-seeing eyes and prying questions from not only parents but also from grandparents, siblings and the like. (We will add this to the list of reasons why I don’t really intend to date any Korean men while I’m here.) To combat this problem, Korean towns and cities have prevalent DVD-bangs (movie rooms) where you can rent a room with a couch, order in food and watch any number of movies in your own private space. As you might imagine, they basically serve as make-out rooms for young, randy, privacy-strapped couples. There are also scores of love motels that rent rooms by the hour and include things like heart-shaped beds and mirrors in odd places. These are also excellent, cheap places to stay for traveling Westerners who want something better than a hostel but don’t want to pay for a real hotel. We might get funny looks when four of us check into a room, but wallets have never been ashamed of a little thrift.

Now, you might think that my reluctance to date a Korean (relationships are difficult enough without such a severe language and culture barrier) might cut short my marriage prospects in this country. But you would be mistaken. As I was strolling around the school with two of the grade 2 teachers after lunch one day, several boys were following behind us like nervous puppies and talking to us in Korean. While it’s widely known that I speak no Korean, the students still expect me to magically understand what they say even when they’re not speaking English. Finally Moon-Sun (that’s phonetically correct, at least), the science and math teacher, told me that one of the boys was asking me to marry him. I laughed, and told the boy that we could talk about it in ten years. According to Moon-Sun, he then said that love and age are not the same. Cheeky little blighter. Or perhaps budding Korean Casanova? We’ll find out in about a decade.

Addendum: xkcd goes to Korea?