At age 26, I’d never had a boyfriend. My whole life until then had been spent queer but not dating, chasing connection in hookups only to find that same familiar, cavernous void. I watched BL dramas for inspiration, and then reality TV shows. Worlds to live inside when my own romantic life felt bleak.
I wrote for Teen Vogue in August 2024 about how Netflix’s Japanese MLM reality dating show The Boyfriend, which wrapped its 15-episode second season on February 3, 2026, gave me hope that I could be vulnerable enough to find my person.
“If there’s one thing I know about the green room,” I wrote about the contestants’ shared home, named for the glassy barrel that forms inside a wave as it breaks hollow, and the site of romantic tension as a fresh batch of singles take the plunge, “it’s that the next time I’m facing the barrel, I won’t let the wave pass me by.”
Three months after publishing that essay, amid a budding New Zealand spring, I met the love of my life.
We were meant to be a quick fling. A night of feeling less alone in the world, skin-to-skin, days before my flight to return home. I remember his glossy black hair down to his neck; a kind smile and some forbidden magic in his eyes. He felt different.
The pledge I had written in my essay became the standard to which I held myself. I owed it to myself to act on the feelings this man conjured within me. Four days later, as he wheeled my suitcase to the airport terminal, I found my courage and asked to take him on a proper date—he said yes.
What makes dating shows like The Boyfriend so appealing is that we meet them in the chase. Blossoming feelings, simmering jealousy; it all makes for gripping, resonant television. But that’s the nature of the show, the structure of a story that’s produced, manipulated. The real work begins outside of the green room.
Getting to know my boyfriend was easy. It was letting him in that took time. The green room is exhilarating, but what happens when the wave breaks? Was I seeing him through rose-tinted glasses? Could I reveal the dark, prickly innards of myself? I took them off, opened my eyes, and to my surprise he was still there, waiting.
He’s adventurous, unafraid. Grounded. A theater boy from the Philippines. The kind of guy that must hug a tree for his own sanity. It was disconcerting, witnessing reality changing around me —suddenly romcoms and BL dramas, the lyrics of love ballads, started making sense.
During a press junket for The Boyfriend season 2, I was able to share my story with the cast. The legacy of the show is in stories like mine, rippling everywhere, and it’s also in the love connection between Huwei and Bomi, running through the season like a spine.
“Love is something that you have to expose, to reveal your true self, even your weaknesses, too,” graduate student and Olympic hopeful Huwei, 26, tells Teen Vogue via interpreter. “And sometimes it could be hurtful to the person that you care about, or it could be an encouragement.”
Huwei’s right. My boyfriend has knitted himself into my world, and the tapestry of my life is more beautiful for it. But exposing, revealing my true self only accentuates the trauma, the patchwork of the past, that still lives in my bones.
Building a relationship is a lot more than love and feelings and the excitement of chasing after someone you want. It’s hard work. It’s working through my triggers, putting aside my pride and deflating my ego enough to not give up at the first sign of danger. The red lights and alarm bells at the outset of a disagreement still make me want to flee, to protect myself from danger—only to find out later that we were never in jeopardy, that the thought of the relationship ending was entirely my own making.
Bomi, 23, a university student in Kyoto, left the green room having found his first ever boyfriend. “I was scared to trust someone, but I think love doesn’t start unless you trust that person,” he says. “Be honest with your feelings, it’s not a competition. If you don’t like something, say that you don’t like it, and you should fight, go head on directly.”
I’m still learning this. Disagreement can be healthy and it’s in finding a solution together that we find what we’re made of. My go-quiet, ignore-everything approach can’t serve me anymore.
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I still have my flaws. I still get hung up on insignificant things, I test his triggers. I’m compulsive and imperfect, because growing up, getting something wrong was unacceptable, punishable. But he grants me grace. He brings care, consideration, calm.
My dad, a trauma-informed practitioner, talks a lot about being seen, heard and valued. I had never felt those things in my body at such strength until I met my boyfriend.
There’s something in our shared cultural values. I felt a lightness traveling through his home province in the Philippines last November, and shed tears at the Christmas mass as the entire town gathered in song. Careful to not cosplay the life of a local or romanticize their circumstances, I gained a deeper appreciation for who he is.
His friends, many of them queer men, have welcomed me not simply as an extension of him, but as a complete person in my own right.
Last year when I sat at the heart of New Zealand’s parliament and interviewed Māori politician Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, he was right next to me, learning about my culture. When we become dysregulated, we press our noses together and share the breath of life—hongi, a traditional Māori greeting—in and out until we are in sync.
Now I know what love is.
It’s the scent of ylang-ylang that lingers on his shirt. The purple ube ice cream we covet in a cup of halo-halo. It’s in the way he sees me, describes me—the feeling, he says, of eating hot noodles as a typhoon wages a war outside.
I’m somehow still my own person but inextricably his.
And still, milestones I had never dreamed of continue to manifest. We have mail, utility bills, with both of our names on it. There’s a distant and faint hum of wedding bells too, in the hopes that our older family members might be around long enough to hear them ringing.
If it weren’t for The Boyfriend, I wouldn’t have mustered the courage to tell him how I felt. But now I can say I know about the green room. I can say that I faced the barrel, I surrendered to the wave, and it carried me to him.
