What does the K-Drama Love Featuring Marriage and Divorce teach us?
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This K-drama has a lot to unpack. The creators of this show seem to want to teach viewers the reality of love and marriage. We are initially introduced to three couples, but throughout the series these couples separate due to infidelity and have to re-navigate love and relationships. But I believe these characters teach us lessons we can apply to your lives.
- Treat your partner with care.
This couple teaches us to treat the people we love with care. Boo-Hyerung and Sung Hoon were a couple that just married for 3 years until Sung Hoon started an affair. While I do not agree with the affair, I want to address the possible causes. Hyerung during the marriage has completely neglected their relationship; she believed that her demands were more important. We can see this in how she treated her husband. She was only nice to him if he had met her demands, but as soon as he did not or refused, she started to hurl insults and/or violence, as seen in the photo above.
When Sung Hoon admits to her that he has started an affair with another lady, she is enraged. She is furious because a man she thought was devoted to her had actually given his heart to another lady and even had physical relations with this other lady. But the course of actions that occurred after is important. Boo Hyerung, after hearing about her husband’s affair, starts to take out her rage on her husband at every chance she gets. That one time, she was hitting him, and his nose started to bleed. When he offers a divorce because their relationship is unmendable Hyerung uses the chance to hold power over him and refuses to divorce. Then, although she refuses to divorce, she also refuses to forgive unless she is able to see the woman. But through this relationship, Hyerung refuses to acknowledge her nasty attitude is the reason why her husband seeks companionship with another lady. In addition, her husband is also wrong for starting an affair instead of just breaking off the relationship.
The fact is both parties started to neglect their marriage and it led to infidelity because even though Hyerung had not committed physical infidelity she was committing emotional infidelity. She started to become attracted to her executive producer Seo Ban just because he was more masculine than her husband. If both had more care for each other than I believe the marriage would have worked out a different way.
- Marriage is more than just care.
This couple Lee Si-Eun and Park Hae Ryun is a perfect example of marriage is not just care. Si-eun was a devoted wife to her husband. On top of working, she prepared meals for him and made him have fresh clothes, she was practically a devoted mother than wife. To get married she had to forsake her family to be with him, swapping a life of luxury to pinching pennies and making budgets. To get her husband a new car she saved money for 2 years. I think this couple is the couple I feel bad for the most. Between all that her husband cheated on her, why? She cared for him physically but not emotionally. When he did something nice for her, she proceeds to nag about how expensive it was and you can tell her husband was severely hurt from that. On top of that, he booked a private time for them at a hotel to have some alone time and flat out rejected it because it must have been expensive and that they had beds at home to stay at. Since that time you can say his heart drifted away from the relationship, which led him to cheat.
Through this couple it teaches us that care does not always equal love, because everyone is different. That is why love languages exist, although an individual can like all 5 languages we prefer some over the others. Hae Ryun may have loved acts of service from his wife but quality time and physical touch was what he wanted more.
- Do not change yourself.
This couple, Shin Yu-Sin and Sa Pi-Young, had a lot of secrets. Why? Pi-Young lied about who she was as a person. She played into this perfect wife character so she was able to snag her husband. But she believed if she played this perfect role and did what she thought she was supposed to do her husband would never cheat on her. She became a whole other person that when her husband cheated on her she was lost.
You find this when Pi-Young has a conversation with her mother that she changed herself just so Yu-Sin can love her. She had a child for him so he can never leave her. She even said she dresses up nicely everyday so he never gets tired of her. Even when her friends/ co-workers told to be careful because her husband can cheat on her, she refused to believe it, saying that she would never cheat on her, especially since she had a child, until he actually did.
In the end, you might be a little confused but marriage is a complicated process, that is why marriage and love is a choice. Everyday you have to choose to love your partner. There are no set rules you need to follow to have a fruitful relationship. But one important thing that all the marriages in the show lack is communication. Imagine if every partner communicated what they wanted to each other how things could have been different. But this is something we can take beyond romantic relationships. I have lost friends due to feelings building up and the refusal to address these feelings. You can even reflect on the relationship you lost because you did not communicate your feelings. In the end, the show teaches us how communication is important to keep a relationship going. Be honest with your feelings.