In this essay, writer K-Ci Williams examines Japanese reality dating show The Boyfriend, which recently aired on Netflix, and how it inspired him to embrace the vulnerability of dating.
I met this total sweetheart of a man in April. He was my type; hilarious, dimples for days, and he liked me back. What was meant to be something fun and casual ended with ordering pizza and watching Alex Kingston mothering the hell out of a Doctor Who episode. He asked me out on a date after, I said yes. But I let the distance grow between us. I checked in weeks later to learn he’s dating someone. I never got that second date.
I am afraid of falling in love. Don’t get me wrong, I love love, I love watching love, I write about love all the time. The queer joy of Nick and Charlie in Heartstopper, the sweet and spicy BL dramas, the animalistic thrills of Red, White & Royal Blue — love stories that I loved so much I had to write about them. I watch them breathlessly, captivated by high stakes love that feels so unattainable for me; I can feel a simulacrum of romantic love on screen, yet remain safe in the cage of my own making.
Enter The Boyfriend, the Japanese MLM reality dating show from Netflix, which wrapped its 10-episode run on July 30. Nine men, aged 22 to 36, descend upon a seaside Tateyama beach house in Chiba Prefecture, Japan, where they spend one month living together and working shifts at a coffee truck to earn their keep.
Still awake at 4 a.m., coming down from a binging stupor, I stared blankly at my screen as Glen Check’s “Dazed & Confused” plays the final episode out (the song also soundtracked Kitty and Dae’s first kiss in XO, Kitty). The series, in all its blissful domesticity, is over. I’m left confronting versions of who I used to be, and who I hope to become.
In The Boyfriend, the “Green Room” is the house the guys move into; elsewhere, the green room is a backstage space for performers, and in surfing, it’s the glassy green barrel that forms inside a wave as it breaks hollow, the site of exhilaration as the surfer erupts through the other side. In episode 5, Usak, 36, leaves the Green Room of his own volition — I bawled as he said, “I was able to accomplish my goal of sharing my feelings. I can leave here feeling good about that.” He entered the green room, faced the barrel, and emerged victorious.
It’s a kind of courage that I envy. Why can't I be like that? I cut myself off before the connection is even made. Why am I scared of real connection? Truthfully, it’s because I don't want to bare all my aching, bloodied parts. I still don’t quite believe that anyone could love me enough to stay.
A friend once told me he hopes to have been in a few relationships before he settles down; this baffled me. I couldn’t fathom how he could entertain a partner knowing their relationship would probably be eclipsed by a future with someone else. I am more pragmatic, holistic in my approach. I can’t bring myself to invest time and energy into something that doesn’t chart a course for a planned future. Love is not just the tension and the buildup, it’s all the real world sh*t like bills and taxes and doctor’s appointments and making phone calls.
Like artist Shun, 23, I have struggled with attachment issues. The woman who birthed me kicked me out of home when I was 10, sending me to live with my dad. I can trace its subtle impact on my life; the way I’d attach to people, my inflexibility, hating when plans changed — Shun, on the other hand, was abandoned as a baby.
Shun admitted to feeling trapped and dependent in his previous relationships, and much of those experiences have clearly informed who he is and how he behaves. Trauma is prickly, it pervades and persists, so Shun’s struggles in the Green Room made total sense to me.
When Shun gave his shirt to university student Dai, 22, and asked him to wear it, he grew upset when Dai disregarded it. “I compared you to him,” Shun told Dai about his ex-boyfriend. “He was always wearing my T-shirt. It was a way of showing love.”
Sometimes in our minds we assign good feelings to certain things — Shun’s lover wearing his clothes — and when those things don’t happen, it can feel like rejection. And above all, that’s what I seem to fear: though I’ve done the work to weed out irrational behaviors, I’m imperfect, and what if that leads to rejection?
Tangled up in all of this are the internal and external pressures to have a family, to take that fantastical romantic love and convert it into raising the next generation. Over the course of the season, conversation in the Green Room drifts to adoption, on whether the house members want to start a family. It makes me ponder the future of my whakapapa, my family tree. I am my dad’s only biological child; the only grandchild of my late grandfather, George Albert Williams. If I don’t have a child, our whakapapa ends with me.
I think of how, after my tīpuna lost their land and way of life to colonization, I am living proof they were here. But would I be irresponsible, under my own circumstances, to bring a child into this horrible, messed-up world? We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams — am I about to crush the dreams of mine?
Asking the question is valid, and it is also another way of avoiding commitment. It’s a distraction, to agonize over it delays my ever having to discover the answer. It keeps me from thinking about being single, makes the burden a result of familial expectations rather than something that is within my own reach.
For me, The Boyfriend was never about which couples were or weren’t endgame. It was about connection — that willingness to open yourself up to love, with no guarantees of its success or longevity. The Green Room guys that have stayed with me are the ones I most aspire to be like; the collected and regulated chef Kazuto, 27; the measured and considered designer Taeheon, 34; and IT professional Alan, 29, who leads with his heart. They have reached a part of me I’ve long neglected. My cryogenic heart is thawing.
I will confess my feelings to the next guy, like Usak, because even that will be an accomplishment. I’m grateful that through many resources, including my dad, who studies trauma and neuroscience, I have been able to heal and center myself, yes, in the context of all in which I live and what came before me.
In the past, I’ve been someone who decides the other guy wouldn’t be interested, without letting him have a say in the matter. I’ve decided that he wouldn’t stay through the tough, murky stuff, without giving him a chance to prove he would. Despite lustful encounters and flirtations, I have never in my life dated a man — but I’d like to. And if there’s one thing I know about the green room, it’s that the next time I’m facing the barrel, I won’t let the wave pass me by.
