I told the woman at the hagwon yesterday that I couldn't teach there. Yay!

Last night I had dinner with my friend M, the one who is thinking about getting married to her fiance. That's right, she's already affianced (sort of), but she's not 100 percent sure.

Having been to two weddings recently of three dear friends, I have to say that I don't get it. I'm pretty sure that One-Armed Maggie, Def and Stave were 100 percent sure about their chosen partners far in advance of their weddings.

Of course, they didn't undergo a matchmaking session set up by their parents, which is how M met her fiance. And they weren't being pressured to get married the way M is getting pressured. At age 27, she's considered near expiration, I guess.

The social pressures I do understand. But what perplexes me in the extreme is M herself. Her fiance is someone from the town her parents are from. He's never been abroad. He's hardly even been out of his province. He's said outright that he wants his wife to stay at home and take care of him and their children. He doesn't want her to keep her male friends after they get married. When she said she wanted to, he said he couldn't stop her, but that he wouldn't meet them.

She's got a master's degree, has a good command of English, has lived abroad, is opinionated and strong-willed, has ambitions, and, as she said, was "brought up to be a scholar." She knows that if she gets married to her fiance, she'll probably have to give up living in Seoul, her friends here, her job -- everything, pretty much. And yet she's considering it. Very seriously. Like, 85 percent sure she'll be married to him by next spring.

As I've said before, it may be just M -- she's a pretty conservative Christian, and she mentions God a couple times per every conversation of length that we've had. But it's not like she's SO eager to get married that she's taking the "he'll do" attitude. She wants kids, but isn't dying to have them right now.

In the end, despite my efforts to be open-minded and culturally accepting -- I just don't get it.