Worth watching

I must say that I appreciated the drama.

One thing that kind of disturbed me is the confusion between being "untamed" and unreliable. I don't think that controlling one's partner is a goal in a relationship, but couples do, and should, negotiate boundaries and rules and be mindful of what one's partner is comfortable with -not saying that each have to agree to anything, but each one's concerns should be discussed and taken seriously-. This is true even if open or polyamorous couples. People have boundaries that they have every right to ask be respected, and if they treat someone with loyalty, respect and honesty, they have every right to expect to be treated in the same manner in return. This does not mean that people cannot fall out of love and in love with someone else, but it does mean that there is a difference between deceiving your partner versus being honest with them and breaking things off cleanly and respectfully, without going behind their backs for more than a year like she did. Again, if she had merely dumped him because she didn't love him anymore and loved someone else, then it would have been a completely different situation and, however painful, I wouldn't have had a problem with that, given that the alternative would have been to deceive her partner, which she did.

When pursuing a long term relationship, I don't think that it is a good think to glorify being unreliable, or to confuse it with being strong and independent, as if they are the same thing, or even as if you cannot have one without the other. It's not being "wild" and "uncontrollable" and something impossible to decouple from being a free spirited and independent person: we are mixing two things that don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. One can be fiercely independent and still be reliable, show up for the people they love and be there when it matters, and be honest and upfront if they change their mind.

I mean, I struggle to come to terms with where the exact boundary is, and in the end I can only draw the line at treating one's partner with honesty:
1. As much as one might wish to, one cannot guarantee that they won't fall out of love and/or in love with someone else. I think that if the situation is such that it is a true change of heart, and not a superficial whim, if this is discussed honestly with one's partner then really they have no reason to complain about the person's conduct given those premises: they might complain about fate and the circumstances, and wish things were different, but given that they are not and that the only alternative was to be deceived, being treated with honesty and respect rather than being lied to and cheated on is the best one can do and expect.
2. That said, people can also draw the appropriate conclusions from the situation and are not obliged to take such a person back if they change their mind. In fact, while I think that such a case would be quite different from the shamelessness of going up to someone you had deceived for more than one year and ask them to take you back, I also think that one would have every right to ask themselves if the person might have another change of heart down the line, because after all they already did, and while they might appreciate the fact that they didn't break their trust and talked about the situation honestly, one also doesn't really want to repeatedly end up in a situation where a person changes ones' mind, so the question of why they did and why it's not likely to happen next time around is still relevant.
3. In terms of people's wishes, when talking about stable relationships and building a family, clearly people would like to be with someone stable and reliable that they can count on to be there in time of need and to show up when it counts. This does not guarantee that one's feelings couldn't change with time and they might fall out of love, and in that case we come back with the importance of honesty and being up front about the situation and what to do -do you want to wait and try to rekindle the flame? Do you up?-. Being with someone so flaky and unreliable that they could change their mind at a moments' notice and want to break up, then come back unannounced after years they didn't speak a word to you and want to get back together really is not a nice prospect, albeit a quite different and much better one than the real situation faced by HS, namely being with someone that deceived him for more than a year (and we are not sure even owned up to it and admitted it at any point in time, even when asking him to take her back, when he really deserved the ability to make an informed decision and that piece of information would have been very important).
4. From what I understood, HS knew about YJ seeing DK behind his back for more than a year while she was lying to him about working, so it's not that he knew because she told him, he was aware of it beforehand. Does this mean that at no point in time she actually confessed to having carried on a more than year long affair with DK? Because that would be utterly damning in my eyes, if she came back after running off with DK for two years, had the gall to ask HS to take her back, and deprived him of the ability to make an informed decision by hiding such an important piece of information. If I was thinking of taking someone back, it would matter *a lot* if they had been respectful and honest in the relationship prior to the breakup. I might still have some concerns about the possibility of repeating the experience if they change their mind in the future, but I could at least assume that they would be open in their communication and let me know if their feelings change. If they had deceived me for more than one year, it would be a whole other matter. As I said above, this is the equivalent of depriving him of a very important, I would say even critical, piece of information very much relevant to his decision of whether to take her back or not. To hide this information from him while asking him to make this decision would be in essence to deprive him of the ability to make an informed decision about a key aspect of his life, asking him to make a choice based on faulty premises and in essence treating him like an object and self servingly manipulate him to get the outcome you want while in essence continuing to deceive him -a lie by omission, and I suppose a good old fashioned lie if he ever asks and you deny the truth like back in the day when she was telling him she was working while seeing DK behind his back-. Not saying that this is what she did, but frankly, it's another of the things that I wished the show was not vague about: she does kind of brush off his words at the side of the road, they never talk about it again if not in that insultingly jocking manner that completely disrespected the severity of the topic and the pain expressed in that outburst on their way to the airport, in the end it's not clear to me whether she knew he knew. I guess that there are various options: he did discover it himself, having been aware of it during that more than half a year of deception, but it's not clear whether he told her he knew, or she discovered he knew, at some point in time prior to her asking him to take her back, or whether she told him about it at some point in time prior to asking him to take her back, or whether she just plain didn't knew he knew and intentionally hid it from him while asking him to take her back. Hiding it from him while asking him to decide whether to take her back would have been unacceptably self serving (and if she didn't say because she already knew he knew, I guess that we are left with the question of whether she would have... given how self serving and self entitled she had been this whole time, and the way she lied about leaving to allow him to follow his heart, while in reality she was threatening him with the prospect of getting back with DK again, and later on almost running off with him, because she couldn't take him being the one to leave her -so, to protect her pride she chose to leave and hurt him again, choosing to hurt him again like she did in the past and only changing her mind at the last second, and in any case after using DK to make HS jealous and threaten him into begging her to stay-). I guess that we know for sure that FL doesn't know about this because HS just told her his gf dumped him, and one would hope that his cousin didn't either, because otherwise it's hard to imagine why he would want to associate with someone that treated someone he claimed to love in such a manner -his reactions to her coming back were akin to what one would expect from her changing her mind about being with HS, rather than someone that had intentionally deceived him for more than a year-. Again, this is someone that the shows asks us to expect wouldn't tolerate his gf being kissed by someone else without reciprocating even before they were together, an absurd notion given that he was a playboy himself, not to mention hitting on his cousin's girlfriend, and a notion that felt to me like overthinking and underestimating him (or maybe it's HS's trauma speaking, when he says that even if he pretends he is okay he is not I got the feeling that this is what he felt with DK when he brought up the betrayal and hating DK in the end and they made it into a joke -even after recently using him to hurt HS, make him jealous and force him to beg her to stay-... but we know that he tried to play it cool while being disturbed by DK in the past).

In all this, I obviously ignore the unrequited mini-crush with the one sided kiss, one because he did that to someone that showed him no loyalty, respect and honesty and therefore had no leg to stand on to ask the same in return, while she did it to someone she knew had always loved only her and never even took a coffee with another girl (therefore, they would not be even even if he did to her exactly what she did to him with more than one year of deception, etc.; there is simply no way for him to get even, no comeuppance, the fact being that he was the kind of person that would put up with more than a year of betrayal and wait around for years for her to come back, while she was unwilling to even give him the space to sort out his feelings, and resorted to threatening him with getting back with the man she had cheated on him with... and he doesn't even come close to even in any case: their relationship is profoundly unequal, as are their expectations for each other, the latter being severely, almost comically, unbalanced in YJ's favor, and it's telling that she is not willing to endure a billionth of a fraction of what he went through for the sake of the relationship), two because it's simply laughable to talk about this in the same breath as her lying to his face for more than a year -and potentially hiding this fact even after asking him to take her back-. Again, I would have very much preferred a full blown affair with someone that wanted him back, so that she would have to actually struggle to get him back -instead of him trying to get her not to leave him for DK again-: as awful I felt about World of the Married for having them back together, if I recall correctly, at least ML had to sweat for it more than YJ did here, where she merely needed to show up twice and then she was back with HS, and he was the one chasing after her and begging her to stay, again. Not that I think that either in World of the Married or here they should have gotten back with the people that had originally betrayed them, much better situation in A Good Lawyer's Wife or The Magicians where the betrayed spouse/girlfriend has a revenge affair and does not go back with the cheater -again, turnabout is fair play, and they cannot exactly complain of being paid back with their own coin: what goes around comes around, and if someone treated you with no respect, loyalty and honesty (as is the case with the year long deception, and was the case with the husband/boyfriend cheating in those other shows), they are not entitled to get any themselves-. In any case, nothing even comparable to this karmic/poetic justice happened in Coffee Prince, as anyone with a sense of perspective, or a neuron in their skull, would have to acknowledge.

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