According to XUAN解忧树洞, a 31 year old office worker from Setapak, Kuala Lumpur, says a three-year relationship came to an unexpected end after he discovered a secret his girlfriend had kept from him since they first met.
As someone who was busy with work and preferred staying at home, he had little experience with relationships.
Three years ago, he met a woman who immediately caught his attention. She was beautiful, soft-spoken and exactly his type.
However, there was one thing that seemed unusual about the relationship.
His girlfriend was extremely conservative when it came to physical intimacy. She was comfortable holding hands and hugging, but whenever he tried to take their relationship further, she would turn him down.
She explained that her religious beliefs were important to her and that she wanted to reserve intimacy until after marriage. She also asked him to respect her decision.
Although his friends joked about the couple dating for three years while only holding hands, he continued to trust her and believed that finding someone with such strong principles was rare.
That changed last year when the couple went shopping at Setapak Central.
After having a meal, his girlfriend said she wanted to use the toilet. He happened to need to go as well.
But when he walked into the men's restroom, he noticed a familiar figure standing near the urinals.
The clothes were familiar.
So was the handbag.
Even the shoes looked exactly the same.
When the person turned around, he was left completely stunned.
It was his girlfriend.
That night, she broke down in tears and finally told him the truth.
She revealed that she had been assigned male at birth but had subsequently lived her life as a woman.
According to her, she had wanted to tell him when they first met. However, as their relationship became more serious, she became increasingly afraid that revealing the truth would cause him to leave her.
She eventually lost the courage to tell him.
For him, the revelation brought a mixture of anger, sadness and confusion.
What hurt him most was not simply her past or identity, but the fact that she had kept such an important part of her life from him for three years.
He felt that he had never been given the opportunity to know the truth and decide for himself whether he wanted to continue the relationship.
The couple eventually broke up.
Before they parted ways, she asked him one final question:
“If I had told you the truth on the first day we met, would you still have been with me?”
He did not answer.
Today, he says he still thinks about her and believes that the feelings they shared were genuine.
However, the experience has left him wondering whether love alone can sustain a relationship when honesty was missing from the very beginning.
For him, the three years of love may have been real.
But once trust is built on a secret that was never given the chance to be disclosed, moving forward together can become almost impossible.
Jovy Jing (ndreagoh@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact creator@newswav.com.
