“Tonight I really thought it would happen.”
He brushed the hair from my forehead, fingertips grazing my ear. I held my breath without meaning to. Under the EXIT sign, the neon between us flickered. 12:30 a.m. Only we remained at the table.
He said, “It’s cold outside… want to stay?”
My heart had already turned to sand. The thick coat, the carefully polished tone, the invisible cloak of the good girl—all of them pressed down on me at once.
If only I could go mad for just a moment.
But I shook my head. “Ah, I have to get back early. I’ve got something at dawn tomorrow.”
A lie. The only thing at dawn was waking up before two in the afternoon.
The whispered tab
Why did my eyes keep circling him that night? I wanted to catch his wrist. I wanted to trace the hidden stubble at the nape of his neck. Yet every word that left my mouth was a non sequitur.
I had clung to the role of angel of first love for far too long. Looking back, the role came with rules:
- No kissing on the first date.
- “I like you” only allowed after the third meeting.
- One bottle of beer—half left untouched, out of politeness.
The commandments multiplied. I brewed my own venom and stored it under my skin; whenever someone came close, I offered the sting first. Thus I lived twenty-three years without a single kiss.
Hayeon’s curling toes
Hayeon, 27, second-year master’s. A random page from her diary begins:
“May 3, library fourth floor. Jaehyeok approached, the day I wore two silicone hair ties on my wrist. He said, ‘After your all-nighter, want ramen?’ I nodded. My heart pounded like it would burst. But on the late bus home, I clenched my big toe and whispered, No, no, no, hundreds of times. Good girls don’t eat ramen with a guy at 2 a.m.”
After that, Jaehyeok’s messages grew sparse. One day she saw a bowl of ramen cooling in snowy twilight. Jaehyeok feeding another girl—fork flashing.
“This is the price of pretending to be good.”
Minseo’s scapegoat
Minseo, 30, account executive at a design agency. She carries a story told like ghost-lore.
Three years ago on a Jeju trip with colleagues: You’ve really never kissed anyone? “Yeah.” Then do it now, with anyone. A drinking-game penalty. She and a stranger—Hyunwoo—were pushed into a room alone. The moment the light went out, Minseo knelt at the foot of the bed and cried.
“Do I want to be a good person, or do I want to be a puppet pretending to be good?”
Even while sobbing she apologized to Hyunwoo. Forty minutes later, she reappeared before her friends, glass in hand, smiling. Her eyes were bloodshot, but no one asked.
The chain forged by niceness
Psychologist Martha McCluskey calls this boomerang of desire “goodness imprisonment.” The more we wedge ourselves into the virtuous slot, the more we must ignore every sexual or emotional signal aimed our way. Yet ignoring never erases them; it only converts them to weight that settles on our shoulders.
We’re frightened: if we take off the mask of niceness, we’ll be left nothing but a heap of desire. The hidden truth is that this very desire is what makes us human.
It was never that we couldn’t love. We simply turned love into taboo.
Who locked my lips?
The performance of niceness was a joint production of offhand lines from friends, family, teachers:
- “Our girl’s sharp—she won’t get messed up over some boy.”
- “Romance can wait till college. Once you’re in a good school, you’ll meet good people.”
Each harmless remark forged another link in the padlock. I myself finally threw away the key, leaving my lips bound.
The kiss that never was
A kiss is not mere contact. It swallows, in one moment, the other’s desire and my own, the anxiety and the rapture born when the two collide.
Twenty-three kissless years were, in the end, fear that I might unknowingly hand someone my anxiety. That fear disguised itself as virtue, and the virtue whispered to every suitor: If you touch me, I might break.
The question that remains
Tonight, I wonder: if I had said “Let’s go in” under the EXIT sign, would the world have ended? Or only the costume of playing nice?
And at this very moment—what nice act are you performing? If you shrug it off, whose desire will finally step into the light?