They say that you marry your mother.
He had heard that phrase years ago, though he wasn't entirely sure where. As a child the phrase meant nothing to him. Into his teenage years, that time when finding your significant other and planning your life after high school became the goal of many others his age, his mind would pull up those few simple words. Why on earth would he marry a girl like his mother when he did every thing he could to stay away from her? Yet the phrase made it seem like it was inevitable, that any girl he found and was determined to marry, would become like his mother.
His parents were not exactly grade A parenting material, often he wondered why they had decided to have a child in the first place. Kadic, in his school years, had become a reprieve to get away from them. His father's disapproval of whatever it was he did, it was easy to escape him when he was miles away. His mother was different, she would never insult him, never raised a hand against him, yet it the way she acted around him and the little things that she said and did that always just managed to get under his skin.
He had decided early on in his teenage years, much in thanks to his mother, that marriage was something that he didn't need. Something that he had sworn off altogether. He had stepped off the bus on his first day at Kadic determined to just get through school. He was uninterested a long term relationship and tried to make that as clear as possible. He didn't want commitment, their girly obsessions over him, or to find a woman who was just like his mother. Solitude, he decided, suited him just fine.
And then Ulrich Stern met Yumi Ishiyama in that martial arts class, and his whole look on life was turned upside down.