Moments With Ate Julia And Kuya Dakin, Former “Fubus”

By Mikael Rizada-Borres

When I asked Dakin Sia what he thinks is the funniest thing he has ever done for love, he laughed while covering his mouth with his hand. He then paused to try to remember something from the mental montage of his most embarrassing moments. Soon after, he recounted to me that one time he gave a girl he was courting a ukulele with her name and a bible verse engraved on it. 

“She loved it,” he recalled. “But, you know, looking back, why did I put a bible verse? Why did I even like her? Why everything?”

Dakin’s anecdote compliments what he thinks love is and what love has been for him. “Like everything in life, love is fucking hilarious,” Dakin told me as he and I held our half-empty wine glasses. Dakin preferred his wine white, while I favoured mine to be rosé pink.

Julia Paredes, who filled her glass with red wine, said she will most likely remember her romantic relationship with Dakin — regardless of whatever may happen to it — with that time she was pulling a tantrum in the middle of the street because she didn’t want to leave Dakin’s aunt’s house. That’s where she met the aunt and Dakin’s cousins; that’s where she also drank the day away with the relatives.

“And while I was pulling a fucking tantrum in the middle of the street, he [Dakin] goes, ‘I love you,’ and then he kisses me in the middle of the street, and that shit caught me so off-guard!

“But every time I think of it, it’s so cute,” said Julia, now Dakin’s girlfriend.

Julia and Dakin first met at Ronan Co’s May 2021 birthday party. They separated themselves, the only smokers in the group, from the party to light some cigarettes. “Oh, she was not like the other girls,” said Dakin, who then laughed. “She was different from the other ‘Filipina girlies.’”

She does look like many other “Filipina girlies” — around 5’2” (if not shorter), with long black hair and tanned skin — among many commonalities. But, in some warped way, she’s an astrology-loving agnostic with the accent of a white woman from Pasadena whenever she speaks English. She really is not like the other “Filipina girlies.”

“She was not like other girls,” Dakin reiterated. “She was a badass, she smoked, [...] if you saw her for the first time, ‘She probably drives motorcycles,’ you’d think. 

“She was a bit scary, she was über pretty, and she would drink and smoke. It was really fun. She would curse a lot. She was a different kind of ‘gworl.’” 

Julia, on her part, thought that Dakin looked “serious” since his 5’7” stature towered over her (Julia’s 5 feet tall) and his frowning facial demeanour spooked her. “And then I kind of realized that it was just the two of us who smoked, and I kind of realized that it was just gonna be us outside that house smoking. I was fucking scared,” she said. “‘Oh my God, I’m gonna be talking along, and he’s gonna find me annoying,’” she thought to herself at that time. 

But as they smoked together outside Ronan’s house, Julia got to appreciate the humour Dakin possessed that contrasted with the natural frown on his face. Dakin was also intrigued by Julia’s pretty yet rough-around-the-edges kind of individuality. That first instance of comfort between the two indeed began a budding relationship.

For a month and a half after their first encounter, Julia and Dakin remained friends, but developments in their bond arose. Both were fresh off their breakups from previous relationships, and neither Dakin nor Julia were inclined to jump back into the relationship cycle again with someone new. But simultaneously, they were bored out of their minds because they became single. And since they were friends, it felt easier to flirt with each other online.

Eventually, their friendship did turn into a more intimate (and, by some people’s standards, illicit) affair. As they were flirting through their messages, they joked about how they could be “fubus,” a slang for “friends with benefits,” and a shorthand for “fuck buddies.”  

Dakin admitted that he was the first to initiate the idea seriously — and looking back at his proposition, he believes that even considering the idea of being “fubus” only set out the fate that they would eventually be in an exclusive (and less illicit) affair. “We were bound to be in a relationship,” Dakin said. “We already kind of like bits of each other’s personalities, and we could vibe with each other.”

Inevitability was hinted at throughout their “fubu” phase, which ran from July to October of 2021. In some moments, Dakin would occasionally lean in on that inevitability by accident. “The first time we ‘did it’ [had sex], it was chill, it was casual, right?” Dakin recalled. “Well, I went in for a cuddle afterwards.” Julia got confused and repelled the advance.

But even with the hints of inevitability, they strived to conceal their arrangement from others. For Julia, the hesitation in saying anything about the relationship involved the idea that it was hard to pin down how they would label themselves. “That’s the thing: I couldn’t really say anything. I couldn’t say we were together because we weren’t. I couldn’t say that I was his ‘something’ because I wasn’t,” she explained. 

The lack of clarity on how Dakin and Julia would label their relationship could have led to them hearing commentary from the peanut gallery (mainly consisting of their mutual friends) if their relationship became public. Julia wanted to avoid the supposed expert analyses of her arrangement with Dakin. “We just kind of wanted to figure it out on our own. We didn’t want anyone else chiming in and giving opinions that we didn’t need.”

It wasn’t easy for Dakin and Julia to hide that they were “fubus.” But in some cases, it was from a lack of trying. Dakin said that to keep his friends on their toes, he would throw out breadcrumbs of clues for them to devour. He assumes and somewhat admits that he did it for attention. He took pleasure in watching the peanut gallery be in a scramble about whether he and Julia were more than just friends.

“There was this one time when [Ronan and I] were going out with his girlfriend and a bunch of friends,” Dakin told me. “We were out in Mactan, in a resort. And I was in a hotel room with Ronan. And Julia called me— no wait, I called Julia because I just wanted to say hi to my ‘fubu.’ I wanted to say, you know, ‘What’s up? What are you doing?’ You know what I mean?

Dakin and Julia… doing… I don’t know what…

“And I know that Ronan is in the bathroom, just one wall behind me,” Dakin continued. “And I know he’s listening in. And when he got out of the bathroom and then walked into the room that I was in, I was still on the phone. I was like, ‘Oh, I gotta go. Bye!’

“And then, Ronan went, ‘Who was that?’

“And then, I was like, ‘…nobody.’”

Dakin then wanted to make it clear that while he thought of the situation as a funny snafu, Julia thought of it as a hate-inducing ordeal.

But those tricky bits as “fubus,” albeit hellish for Julia (and pleasant for Dakin), were minuscule compared to the pay-offs they received — the most important being that they cemented their bond in between the sexual escapades. When you trim down their relationship to its essentials, what one realizes is that it is composed of what they call “little moments.”

“It’s really the little things, to be honest,” Dakin said when asked about how he’d memorialize his relationship with Julia. “We don’t go out to the fucking mountains. It’s not really that type.”

From laughing at each other’s sarcastic and dry comedy, to talking for a few minutes while they smoke cigarettes and sit on a park bench, to them kissing in the middle of the street, Julia and Dakin’s romance is not encapsulated by occasions of extravagance and frills, but by instances of comfort. Their love does not stem from a period of feverish and passionate pursuit, but from tiny moments of solace. Those quiet times of just sitting and laying around may be boring for others, but it’s not for Dakin and Julia. “I think those moments are really cute, I think those moments that are really special,” Dakin said.

With those little moments, among other blissful points, Julia doesn’t feel like she needs to ask for a lot. She feels content with what she and Dakin have and what they are and wishes that consistency reigns supreme in their relationship. “Of course, things will change,” she said, “but I do hope that they will change for the better.”

“This will be really awkward if we break up ‘cause this is gonna be on the internet,” Dakin quipped. “We will never fucking break up. Just know that.”

Dakin, Julia, and Mikael conducted the interview through Zoom on Friday, July 15th, 2022.

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