“What? Serious-ah?!”
That’s the general response when people ask and get told the “shocking” truth that I married my sugar mama. A few laugh because they think I’m joking. Some go silent, wondering if I’m being ironic, shameless or somehow traumatised. The inevitable follow up question is something like, “So…married life macam tu…macam mana?” because they assume that the relationship would implode when the money stopped. Honestly, I thought that too in the beginning.
Honestly? Pretty normal. Which is maybe the strangest part of everything.
“Not in front of the Electrician!”
Two years into marriage, the shocking parts of our relationship are mostly shocking to other people now. To me, it’s just life. Marriage has a way of turning even the weirdest love story into arguments about who forgot to switch off the light in the bathroom, what’s for dinner, and fighting for the blanket at night.
I still call her “Datin” sometimes. She complained recently when I did that, in front of the electrician doing some repairs. I grinned at her and said, “Sorry Datin.” It’s part habit, and part cheeky, because she blushes a little, which I find adorable. She kicks my shin – not hard – under the table too. That’s marriage, I guess.
Not exactly the glamorous fantasy people imagine when they hear “sugar mama.”
The funny thing is our relationship stopped being transactional long before we got married. The MCO during COVID probably ended whatever it used to be because we spent so much of that time together.
When we first met, I was 23 and she was 38 and we had the life people imagine when they hear “sugar mama:” Allowances, business events, expensive restaurants and luxury shopping trips. It was fun, and convenient. I never imagined that one day I would be discussing retirement planning, the electricity bill and health insurance with my wife.
Locked Down Together.
When the lockdowns started in 2020, I moved into her house in Ampang full-time because crossing districts every few days during MCO became ridiculous. At first, it felt exciting, a forbidden extended sleepover. Then reality arrived and we were stuck together every day.
No fancy restaurants. No luxury holidays. No random shopping trips to Pavilion because she was bored. Just two people trapped inside a very large house while the outside world felt very far away.
Fear still feels like fear. Stress was still stress. I saw sides of her I had never seen before. Some nights she barely slept. Other nights she’d sit quietly at the kitchen island at 3am peeling and eating a mango, lost in thought.
I saw a scared and sleep deprived lady, selling investments and taking loans to pay her staff and stay afloat. She’d given me this smile, a bit tired and worn. I did the only thing I could do. I just wrapped my arms around her, and held her.
That was probably the first time I stopped seeing her as this intimidating older woman who was always in control. And she saw me differently too.
Before lockdown, our relationship existed mostly in carefully curated pockets of time. Nice dinners. Weekends away. Staycations. Events. Datin also got the full experience of me: Waking up grumpy, doomscrolling COVID news at 11am, forgetting to turn on the rice cooker again and stress eating Maggi Goreng while working at weird hours.
You cannot perform perfection when you’re trapped together for months.
The Reality of Money
We fought properly for the first time during lockdown. Not cute playful arguments. Real ones about the direction of our lives, financial independence and dependence. I think that was the first time I realised how badly I wanted the relationship to exist without money attached to its definition.
Money complicates everything when you love someone. There’s always this ugly voice in the back of my brain asking whether people would still respect our relationship if one of you stopped paying for everything. I hated it because I could never completely silence it.
She was still supporting me financially as I studied and freelanced as a programmer. She paid for most things without hesitation: Groceries, Meals. Petrol and the other expenses of life I didn’t consider. It went from exciting to have someone look after me, to being embarrassing in ways I didn’t know how to explain.
One night during lockdown we had a huge argument about something stupid, probably the result of too many stressful days locked in together with the tension of everything we wanted to say but didn’t know how to say.
I grabbed my car keys, and had my hand on the front door. I didn’t want to leave her, but I wanted, needed, space to think, to breathe. Datin had been quiet for a few minutes… waiting for me, then she said, “Don’t make this house lonely again.”
That sentence hit hard as I realized that somewhere during those months of lockdown, the transactions disappeared, things stopped feeling temporary, our relationship changed and we started arguing about normal things, one ordinary day at a time. I stayed.
She Proposed over Dominos
By 2023, we’d been together six years, survived the pandemic and even talked very carefully about our future. We had agreed without much debate, that children were not for us. We were both career driven. It was not dramatic, just something we both understood.
By then, my career was stable and my allowance had stopped as I worked full time and side hustled as a programmer, contributing equally to finance our household. Datin still earns significantly more and probably always will. But the financial dependency was gone, and our relationship was healthier because of it.
It was a random evening in late 2023, after a long day of work. Dinner was Domino’s and I was reaching for another slice of classified chicken. She’d been quiet and then blurted out, “If we already live like a married couple, why are we pretending otherwise?”
No dramatic speech. No kneeling or rings. I froze, pizza halfway between my plate and mouth. I panicked, not because I didn’t love her. But because that would mean making things public. Boyfriends and girlfriends are one thing. People can dismiss or ignore such a relationship. They cannot ignore a marriage.
My fears were not what people would think of me, but what they would think of her. I was 29. She was 44. That age gap of fifteen years was an unignorable issue when the word “wife” entered the picture. I told her I need time to think and process. She nodded and let me think.
It took me a few days to ask her what made her propose. She told me she didn’t want to keep wondering if I would one day decide she wasn’t meant to be a permanent part of my life. It wasn’t just about what marriage would do to me, but also what the uncertainty of it all was doing to us. I think I already knew her answer. I said yes the next morning.
Of Families and Social Circles
My mother was a mix of confusion and crying. My father could not decide whether he should be worried, disappointed, or accepting. My brother asked if I’d “caught my retirement plan?” One aunt questioned if I was “being manipulated.” Another asked about how much inheritance money I was getting.
Funny how nobody asks these questions when sugar daddies marry the younger woman.
It was the same on her side. They were polite to our faces, but the judgment and the gossip was present beneath the smiles. Some conversations became verbal fencing matches and we held our ground and countered with verbal innuendo of our own. Some of her married friends became weirdly cold once we got married, like I disrupted unspoken social rules by existing.
Funny how a younger husband seemed to make the married women deeply uncomfortable.
Married life is a downgrade
With my parent’s blessing, we got married in 2024 in a small and private ceremony, with only 40 close friends and family attending. We wear rings and we’re honest when asked but otherwise discreet.
After all that drama, our marriage is weirdly ordinary. That was how we knew it was real. Our biggest arguments now are painfully pedestrian: Datin likes the bedroom frozen like arctic tundra while I prefer beachside warmth. My wife wakes up bright and early, whereas I am inhuman until my first cup of Nescafe.
We each contribute a fixed percentage of our incomes to a household fund for bills, groceries and joint savings. Running our home is a shared responsibility. I still handle groceries and small domestic repairs, she manages household logistics and planning because she’s better at it. We both work hybrid and our lives have settled into the routines of ordinary adult life.
I find it amusing that we’ve gone from luxury hotels and business class flights to arguments over who forgot to hang the laundry. Married life is less glamorous and far more intimate.
We have had some difficult conversations and discussions ahead of us both, about aging, healthcare, and the future. That fifteen years is not a problem until you look twenty years ahead.
Our Future Together
She was scared that one day I would wake up and want someone younger. I don’t. Or want children. Not in this lifetime. In turn I’m scared that she’ll be gone long before I am ready for that. These are late-night, honest conversations, and probably the reason why our relationship survives when people expect it not to.
I sometimes think people want our marriage to be some sort of fakery or arrangement because they are uncomfortable with the idea that love can grow in places people dismiss as shallow, transactional and temporary.
I don’t regret how our relationship started. It’s just how we met. Nowadays, I sometimes catch echoes of the past. My wife will cut a mango at 2am while the fridge hums in the background. This house was once a palace I visited. That night during the lockdown comes back sometimes, when she said, “Don’t make this house lonely again.”
Back then I stayed because I loved her. I realized that I wasn’t afraid of losing the money, lifestyle or luxury. I was afraid of losing her.
We just forgot to stop loving each other.
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Read also: ‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman – In Real Life
https://inreallife.my/i-gave-up-my-family-to-pursue-my-dreams-shares-34-yo-msian-woman/
‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman
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