“If you want to see me, these are non-negotiable.”
She exhaled a ribbon of cigarette smoke and began to list her terms. I stared at my reflection in the bar’s restroom mirror and held my breath.
- Never on a Tuesday—that was her ex’s birthday.
- Don’t come near my neighborhood; people might talk.
- Don’t offer me meat; I’ve had my fill of guilt that day.
She flashed a bright, white smile. “If this bothers you, we simply don’t meet.”
When the dial turned, the lights went out
I didn’t realize it then: every condition is a leash fastened around the neck of the one who yields.
The terms were hypocrisy. The more I said I understood, the colder her gaze became. As she refilled our glasses, she added one last thing:
“You’ll stay anyway, because you like me.”
I nodded. Yet inside, a calculator was already whirring: someday, I will rewind this scene and play it in reverse.
Eight months later, a café in Yeongdeungpo
“Sang-woo, you know I’m different now,” Chae-won murmured, scratching her head. After her late shift at the convenience store, her fingers still smelled of cigarettes. Sitting across from me, she spoke the same sentence I once had to swallow.
“Actually… if we’re going to keep seeing each other, could you follow a few things?
- Don’t text first; wait for me to reach out.
- Don’t push drinks on me; only when I want them.
- And never tell anyone where we met.”
She looked away. “If that’s too much… we can stop seeing each other.”
I smiled—the same smile I had worn eight months earlier. In her eyes I saw the unease and humiliation that had once been mine.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I still like you.”
A back-alley motel near Seoul Station, 2 a.m.
Case two. Jun-yeong and Su-jin, both teammates at my company. After overtime, Su-jin pressed a keycard into Jun-yeong’s hand.
“Crash here. I’ll come at four for two hours, then leave.”
Jun-yeong flushed. “What am I supposed to do until then?”
Su-jin shrugged. “Watch TV, order pizza—whatever. I come only when I need to.”
All day Jun-yeong sat alone in the conference room tapping his laptop. When Su-jin finally slipped in, he was picking at cold pizza. She tilted his chin.
“You showered, right?” He nodded. She kissed his neck, but her eyes savored the last scraps of power ticking away in a twenty-four-hour clock.
Why do we crave this imbalance?
“I have conditions” is only a gilded way of saying, “I may need you, but you mustn’t need me.”
Psychologists call it misattributed value appraisal: inflating our own worth by controlling another’s desire. Behind it lurks something darker—the hallucination of power. The shiver of knowing I can refuse you, but you cannot refuse me. That shiver is addictive, and it slowly turns the rule-maker into the one who begs to obey.
The moment the pyramid of terms collapses
Three weeks after Chae-won came back, she wavered.
“Today… you can text me first if you want.”
Quietly I replied, “No. I’ll wait for you.”
Her eyes flickered. This moment, my turn had arrived.
Who are you handing conditions to, and from whom are you receiving them? When the imbalance finally crumbles, will you stand as the victor—or only then realize how completely you have already lost?