Shouzer

My girlfriend and I decided to keep our relationship secret for quite a while. For me, I hate dealing with all the gossipy, stupid conversations like, “Ohhhhhh, you like . That’s so cute…” I just don’t like people prying into my personal life for the most part. To make matters worse, we didn’t know each other well when we started dating. I was worried things wouldn’t work out, and then I’d have to deal with the conversations about why it didn’t work. For her, there is a bit of a stigma for Thai women dating farangs (foreigners). Office romances in general just create awkwardness in general so it seemed like a good idea to keep it low key. Boy was I wrong.

About a month in, things were going pretty smoothly, and it didn’t matter too much to either of us if people found out. Her boss found out that she had a new boyfriend, but she wouldn’t tell him who. He wanted to meet this man so he promised to buy lunch for her, me, and the other girls in the finance department. I agreed to this. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.

As it happens, her boss won the lottery, and he wanted to use this money to purchase the lunch. Once again, it didn’t seem like a big deal. One of the girls from the HR department begged her way into the trip as well. So the girlfriend and the HR girl pick me up, and we head off to the restaurant.

When we walk into the restaurant, we are all equally shocked to find that her boss had invited a whole bunch of extra people. In addition to the finance department and the HR girl, he had also brought along another member of upper management and about half a dozen TTs. Two of these TTs taught with me regularly. Of these people, 1 girl from finance and the HR girl were the only people that knew I was the new boyfriend. I think most of the people there didn’t even realize that my new girlfriend was bringing a date to this lunch. Did I mention I was the only white person there, and more importantly, the only one who didn’t speak Thai? I think you can guess the language of the conversation.

To say that I drew attention is a bit of an understatement. The TTs spent most of the meal trying not to stare. I actually caught one of my regulars staring at me, completely slack-jawed. I never actually had someone stare at me with her jaw on the floor, and I’ll be honest, it was a bit disconcerting. My regular TTs did little to help me out. I was expecting one of them to throw me a life line and start up a conversation. Not so much.

To make matters worse for me, I never really became comfortable dining in a formal Thai setting. The rules are essentially the same, but I obsess over these things more than I really should. I spent a lot of meal worrying that I about etiquette.

I later confronted my TTs about their lack of conversation during the meal. They claimed that they were too shocked to speak. All four of my TTs ganged up on me the day after, and we had the aforementioned dreaded gossipy conversation. It wasn’t actually that bad since we’d already been dating for a month. So on the upside, I manage to avoid that awkwardness.