Ugh (ft. slow and boring)
Cheating dramas are problematic. Without genuine reasons of cheating, it would be difficult to convince viewers to stay. This show gives silly reasons for why men cheat their good & hardworking wives and why women would yearn for company of married men.Without the revenge track, it would be difficult to soothe the fewer viewers who had somehow managed to stay. That's not gonna happen in this one. Nah nah, not in this season, I don't give a rodent's posterior about the revenge, if at all, that happens in next season, if at all, that manages to air.
This show wastes time in talking about random things like golf, oriental medicine, dogs blah blah, in the first half of episodes and glorifying whatever "love"/lust emotions cheaters were feeling in the second half. By the time, it reaches the point of actual cheating, already 10 or 12 episodes are gone. Even good and realistic dialogues are made to lose their charm by saying again and again. Episodes after 5 or 6 can be finished in 15 minutes.
There were one or two things I liked. One, the kids of 50yr couple and 40yr couple. Their words and actions were so mature than their dads' (lol!). Two, the radio station scenes and the ladies' work dinners along with Seo Ban. Both the scenes had interesting dialogues especially Seo Ban's snarky replies.
I can only conclude that the writer has taken her audience for dummies, spoon feeding them; telling them in nagging dialogues instead of showing them with subtlety. She could have written a tighter screenplay excluding all irrelevant scenes. It could have been tiny bit interesting had she not made the mistresses so generic, so predictable.
In final episode, the hurried afterthought of adding new character and "new" links between characters was badly executed cliffhanger. By then, the drama is already an overkill. Although my curiosity is piqued, life is too short and I would rather spend my time watching something amazing.
It's a pity that this was well produced drama oozing extravagance. It's a pity that the music and OST was so good especially, Dead Inside and Memory. It's a pity it had good actors.
Was this review helpful to you?
A Screenwriting and Directing Masterpiece
It seems people want to criticize this series for being too honest. To me, it’s a depiction of the current social environment around us. Not the most appealing, but never the less, it’s there, and we’ve all seen it. Infidelity is a dirty word to one person and a taste of freedom to another. I think this series tells us that we all view relationships differently. Our thoughts, needs, and values are different. We even view love differently. The story I watched for sixteen episodes was a bitter look into the world of betrayal. It shows us how people justify their actions when faced with diversity in a relationship. It also shows us how fragile marriage can be when you don’t nurture it. It shows us how hateful and desperate people can be. It also shows us the ugly head of temptation. I think this series took a lot of thought and work to put together. It was a raw look at the emotional struggles of human beings trying to survive in a world that pulls them apart.I thought the acting was perfect. There were two standouts for me. Lee Ga Ryong’s portrayal of Hye Ryung was just fantastic. Playing this type of character and making it seem real is not easy. Another one of my favorite parts was in episode 7 when Hyang Gi (Jeon Hye Won) told her dad what she thought about him divorcing her mom in no uncertain terms. She said everything her mom wanted to say, and it was priceless. Hye Won shined in this supporting role, and it left me with a favorable impression of her acting skills.
The music pulled everything together, and the subscripts were great. I enjoyed this because it was different. Is it worth watching? Cudos to Im Sung Han for her screenwriting and to Yoo Jung Joon for directing a masterpiece.
Was this review helpful to you?
Brilliant as it is...
What started as a mediocre journey and not having anything to expect got me a little sticky with glue and my eyes intact.I have a different view altogether from what has been reviewed here by most if not many.
It's a brilliant storyline with pretty good cast - maybe its not a big hit as they don't have BIG names in here. Otherwise the flow is fantastic, there's nothing negative i see in here.
Title already tells you it's about marriage and divorce so we should know what to expect. I fell that the cast also did a fantastic job. Really good and better than most.
Grab a pair of chips and see if this works for you. If you're in raving and rooting for handsome/pretty and big names, you ought to skip this one.
Storyline very real and these are things the society goes through every single day. Sit back and enjoy. Give it a chance will you, i reckon you will change your mind.
Was this review helpful to you?
whyyy did i watch this?
horrible, i hate this drama, there wasn't a single thing that i like. the storyline was superrr lacking and boring and so slowww it was going nowhere and why would it has season2 though i don't get it. and i hate slow dramas the most, and this is just the queen of slow dramas. they talked way too much, and i meant toooooo freakinn muuuchhh. 80% of the scenes were just them talking over some meal or tea or whatever. and why would they show a long ass flashbacks? to make the viewers empathise with the cheating men? i just don't get it. acting were sometimes awkward and stiff especially that grandma, sa pi young's mother. literally expresionless, the only thing she did is cried. i'm so happy that it's over, but there's season2 ughhhh this could end in 12eps though.Was this review helpful to you?
Story is about divorce!
I don't know why everyone is so upset about the story of cheaters. It says "marriage and divorce" right in the title! It is obviously a build up to the second season. Without a Season 2 it would be rated a 1 because there is no ending. I thought the acting was great. Each actor played his role well. Most women are blaming the men for cheating and justifying the women's behavior. But I see flaws on both sides. Especially the viper of the lawyer's wife. Wow. What a selfish, self centered biatch. And the self sacrificing professor's wife is just subtilty as self absorbed becoming a martyr for everyone and not truly giving what needs to be given in a marriage. If I was a man I would feel just like her husband. That really plays on a man's self respect. And the doctor's wife is rather conniving, putting on a show but having some deep issues with genuinely loving people. So I have been very interested to see how this all plays out. In this culture, where demeaning men and elevating women in spite of their self-righteous behavior is cool, I would expect the reaction to this show to be critical. We'll see. Perhaps we will all be surprised! I thoroughly enjoyed it, watching relationships crumble because a foundation of love and respect was never built on both sides in every marriage. Now the mistresses.... that is what is a mystery! Conniving or genuine? Can't wait for Season 2!Was this review helpful to you?
Cheating spouses are the worst!
Not a fan of this storyline of cheating spouses but I wanted to give this drama a chance. I am hating the story and characters more and more with each new episode. I am basically fast forwarding through 90% of every episode. I am so disgusted with all the cheating. No matter how unhappy one is in one’s marriage, there’s never a good reason to cheat on your spouse. That’s just a poor excuse. If you’re not happy with your marriage, end it first. Then move on. I am hoping for a silver lining at the end of this. It’s the only reason why I am even sticking through this.Was this review helpful to you?
Like watching a tragic train wreck
It’s a well made series with fine acting, but watching this was pure torture. It appears the writer has a mixed view of men who commit adultery. The story was made worse by continually showing the affairs with their mistresses over and over. Each male character is portrayed as having no conscience, morals or scruples. One husband didn’t have a good marriage, but the other two went off to satisfy their lust while betraying devoted wives and their children, with absolutely no regard for them. It really paints a bleak picture of married life. Women who enter into affairs with married men should realize that these men can never be trusted and have no sense of loyalty, commitment or conscience. The premise that no one loves the same person for a lifetime is easily debunked by the millions of couples who have loved the same person for a lifetime, and you can count me among them, having been happily married for 52 years. Many marry for the wrong reasons and others don’t know the difference between love and lust. This drama would certainly discourage any woman from ever marrying.Was this review helpful to you?
This review may contain spoilers
Please watch if you hate your relationship
If you like dramas that glorify stupid men and adultery, then this is the drama for you. Let me paraphrase so you don’t have to watch this shitshow;-glorifies adultery in a way that the women “deserved it”
-children and wife pressures a married man who is already cheating to stay in a marriage he no longer wants to be in just because they have “so much history”
- a weird love triangle with your husband and mother in law, and is ALSO cheating but preserves his “good man” persona
_Just because you’re a career-oriented werebitch who doesn’t want kids doesn’t mean your husband should go and knock up his mistress
Did I miss anything?
Was this review helpful to you?
A Tale of Two Halves
This easily could have been 12 episodes. I was into this drama for the first 5-6 episodes. Instead of concentrating on the marriages in the first half, and the mistresses in the second half, the director should have mixed it up. Separating the two makes the show boring. It seems like I'm watching the same thing over and over again. Especially the last 3 episodes. The only thing I'm remotely interested in, is when the doctor's wife finds out he's not the perfect husband after all.Prediction: Season 2: The Revenge - The wives get revenge and have affairs of their own... please, make it stop!!
Was this review helpful to you?
A Real Chore to Watch.
With the wealth of material available for use in a Korean drama entitled Love (ft. Marriage and Divorce), it will be an understatement to say how thoroughly disappointing the final product turned out to be. Without doubt Love (ft. Marriage and Divorce) is an unrelentingly difficult show to sit through, like chewing on tough meat that dries your mouth out no matter how much you try to soften it as you simultaneously struggle to swallow it without choking yourself to death. Four episodes in and I was more than ready to throw in the towel. I didn't, and I should have. But the curiosity of what the show was trying to depict got the better of me. I saw *something* in the story that I really wanted to see explore: What drove men to have affairs that risked their marriages? Why aren't they satisfied or content with what they've worked so hard to receive and achieve? Why would a man engage in a relationship that would be potentially and/or so thoroughly detrimental to their own peace of mind and well-being? It is a story that raised these and many other questions about why husbands cheat on their wives, but in the end that *something* and these questions either were never addressed or got off from a starting block.As a viewer I have no qualms about marital infidelity being portrayed on screen as a long as the writer has something to say about it. What I draw the line on, however, is being bored out of my skull watching a bunch of married men going behind their spouses backs to carry on an affair with a bunch of random women for no reason at all. Yes, for one particular couple, the 30s couple, it became obvious why he cheated. But even then the reason as it was packaged and presented appeared illogical, convoluted or just plain senseless. (In fact, this sentiment also could extend to explaining why the other two husbands chose to cheat: you can't; it's all so illogical, convoluted and senseless, and maybe that's the point of the drama.) That the reason was revealed or hinted at so early in the show didn't help me garner any sympathy of the 30s couples, either. I didn't know them well enough as characters to care for any martial problems they had in their fledging marriage. All I saw was a spoilt brat of a wife and a mama's boy of husband - and that kind of immature characterisation hardly endears me to them. More than this, it annoyed me that I held this feeling and judgement toward them, knowing that they appeared to be a young innocent unhappy couple who were struggling deeply in their relationship and needed help, guidance and counselling. I think what the writer was attempting to show was each was crying out for help in a rather strange and roundabout way: Sa Huyn in turning to another woman; Hye Ryung as a result of becoming stressed over everything. Then again perhaps the whole point of Love (ft. Marriage and Divorce) isn't so much as examining why husbands cheat but it is also the wives' naïve assumptions and expectations they have of what marriage is and married life is like and entails. Which also would have been a good theme to explore if it was done skilfully but sadly it wasn't.
One of the main reasons this show' story fell flat on its face for me was in the structure of its telling. The timing of the events that took place is very confusing and all over the place, lending itself to a chaotic format. We had flashbacks taking place in present time, and flashbacks to the past, and flashbacks within the flashbacks taking place in the past. Or were we in fact being taken back to the present and what we were actually seeing were flashbacks of the past in present time? Or were they simply a reflection of the husbands' fantasies taking place in present time or in the past? I have no clue, it was THAT confusing, folks. It also didn't help that we didn't know the duration of these flashback/fantasy events, let alone when they were taking place. Did they take place one day ago or two months? Was the duration of the flashback event 6 hours, five months, a few seconds, or one solitary moment/occurrence? The distinction is important because the length of time informs the viewer just how long or short a couple’s problems have been, which in turn shapes the viewer’s sympathy and understanding or lack thereof they can have toward a character, a couples' story and what led to a husband doing the dirty on his wife. If the timing of the actual events of the story are all over place, everything else falls apart including and especially how and why the husbands strayed. Without that clearly marked timeline, I did find it difficult to demarcate when or what began to go wrong in/with one couple in particular (i.e. the 30s couple). Not only was this very jarring and influenced the way I perceived their relationship, but crucially it affected the way I took to them as individual characters.
Another reason for the story's flat narration is how incredibly and astonishingly passive the characters in each couple were and became over time. Passive, not just in what they do (or didn’t do) but also in what they say and how they said it. The only character who had any agency of her own was the stepmother which made her come alive in her story. Not only does she tell us as viewers what she thinks and feels about certain characters; she actually shows us the depths of thoughts and feelings through facial expressions, verbal sighs and physical bodily responses/reactions. It was a delight to see all that, and crucially it left little to no ambiguity as to what kind of person she is like. Compared that to the narrative tools all the other characters were given to reveal their own personality: overlong and sometimes repetitive speeches that told us all what they think and feel as opposed to SHOWING us what they think and feel through action and behaviour; in some cases, some wives left other characters to do their fighting for them. As a result the characters (including the husbands) appeared hostages to the events that would befall them rather active participants in their own stories, even if that meant they would get hurt or be hurt by others. It is perhaps the reason I found Love (ft. Marriage and Divorce) very sluggish, formed of plodding episodes that slowed the story to a snail’s pace and overdrawn scenes that dragged on for more than was necessary, or unnecessary scenes that were dropped and thrown in for no discernible reason other than to affect the story’s pacing and flow.
Love (ft. Marriage and Divorce) is disappointing for not what it could have been but what for what it ended up being: slow, confusing, overly and unnecessarily stretched out, poor story pacing, a plodding plot devoid of tension, suspension and even curiosity, and not very enjoyable to watch at all. A drama without much drama, as it were. My heart goes out to the actors, to be brutally honest. With a better script and direction, I believe they had all the skill and ability to deliver a compelling story; indeed, they did a really decent job with what they were given and the one hand metaphorically tied behind their backs. That I feel they were robbed of the opportunity makes it all the more sad that Love (ft. Marriage and Divorce) failed in reality to reach the heights its potential seemed to suggest on paper.
Was this review helpful to you?
Never really lived up to its potential
Let me preface this review by saying that I believe people should be able to pursue love in defiance of heteronormative expectations. That being said, I’m very allergic to the “boys will be boys” patriarchal narrative designed to prevent accountability and protect men from the consequences of their actions. It’s an unethical stance that prevents mutual thriving of both partners in a relationship.I decided before settling down to watch this drama that I wouldn’t take the intellectually lazy option of making infidelity simply an issue about morals. It’s an undeniable truism that when it comes to cheating, no one can wreak your home alone. So I approached this wanting to look beyond the simplistic formula of hating the other woman and giving the husband a pass.
The storyline of Love (ft. Marriage and Divorce) is about the reality and complexity of married life and what happens when couples stop nurturing their marriage. We get to see what divides those willing to risk the love that they know for the fantasy they feel they lost along the way from the ones who love faithfully with all that they have and all that they are. In the end, I think one of the most important messages this drama imparts is this: there isn’t a certain kind of identifiable person who will cheat on their spouse.
The three main female characters, who work on a radio show together, are at different stages in their lives (one in her 30s, one in her 40s, one in her 50s) and are all having marital problems - whether they’re aware of it or not. Si-eun, the oldest and longest-married of the three is a dedicated wife and mother constrained, like many mothers are, by the cult of domesticity. She is the epitome of the “good wife” and conforming to this ideal means she is a selfless, sacrificial, self-neglecting caregiver. Her marriage to Park Hae-Ryun is a reminder of what unacknowledged sacrifice looks like.
In the scene before we meet Si-eun’s husband, we see Pi-young - the second oldest of the trio- berating her mother for what she perceives are her shortcomings. Their relationship is estranged because she thinks that her mother’s inability to forgive her father after he had an affair is what killed him. In defence of her father’s behaviour, she tells her mother: “Even I would been swayed by a sweet, kind hearted secretary if I had to come home to a difficult wife. It’s only natural. Rather than being a snob, if you had respected dad as your husband, he never would have cheated on you.”
The ensuing scene tests the veracity of this assumption. We see Si-eun, the good wife, stunned to silence by her husband's request that they end their marriage. His deceptive, and at times unnecessarily cruel, reasons for wanting to end their relationship demonstrates that being a dutiful spouse in a relationship doesn’t always guarantee a happy ending. In reality, Pi-young’s assumptions in the earlier scene about what makes a marriage work isn't always universal and sound rather naïve.
As we watch Pi-young’s relationship with her husband (Shin Yoo-shin) unfold, one thing that becomes very clear is that a man is going to do whatever he wants no matter how clean his wife keeps the house or how hot his meal is. Pi-young and Shin Yoo-shin’s marriage is a reminder of the pitfalls of putting men on a pedestal.
Hye-ryoung, the youngest of the group, thinks that her marriage to Pan Sa-hyun is going well until a rude awakening jolts her to the reality of her situation. Getting married quickly because you fall in love isn't always a good idea, which is why the saying “marry in haste repent at leisure” exists. Theirs is the most toxic of the three marriages because they both lack emotional maturity and have mismatched core values. After endless arguments, what Pan Sa-hyun seeks when he meets Song Won in the gym is mainly the validation of desirability.
Throughout this drama we witness how patriarchial and gendered socialisation impacts the lives of all three women. The actions of the husbands feel a lot like they’re rebelling against adulthood and their readily available symbols of settled male authority. Something which isn’t an option for their wives...because someone (read: a woman) has to ensure that the family’s domestic idyll continues to run like clockwork even if men chafe against the demands of marriage and domesticity. Unlike men, women hold space for the whole emotional story of the family and suffer a huge sense of guilt for not meeting the gender expectations of motherhood. Unlike men who succeed in identities that they define for themselves, women often try to succeed in identities defined for them by society.
There are other behaviours apart from infidelity that are harmful to a marriage and Yoo-shin’s stepmother Kim Dong-mi's passive aggression towards her husband is a stark reminder of this. Despite her outward displays of affection towards him, their relationship isn’t the domestic idyll of first impression. Being married to a man almost two decades older grates on her and we discover soon enough that her devotion to her spouse isn’t really about genuine affection but rather spurned on by the comfort & stability the marriage brings. I was stunned by her apathy and callous disregard for her him in his moment of need… Hello floor, meet jaw.
I expected some compelling drama when I clicked on this show and although it started off rather well, it never really lived up to its potential. I watched it till the end because the flaws of the marriages and their relatable human emotions kept me interested. However this drama has some obvious flaws, which is one of the reasons I haven’t rated it higher. Its main problems were bad editing and a lack of momentum from around half way in when flashbacks start to dominate the storytelling. Also, it's not clear if the intention of the drama is to criticise social norms in Korea or merely to entertain and entrench social attitudes. The ending felt rather rushed and contrived which makes me feel a bit weary about what lies ahead in season 2. Let’s hope the production lives up to its promise of exceeding viewers' expectations.
Was this review helpful to you?
Too many cheating
This is the worst kdrama story about marriage, is that easy to cheat and not that easy either lol . The story doesn’t make sense you just randomly meet person at gym and cheating with her or someone you sat with at airplane lol . Overall there’s no character that I like omg so tiring all the wife’s , the stupid husbands , the grandparents, even the kids they all annoying omg! I never hated Korean dramas more than this story is so despicable and annoying in possible way . I guess the director and writer and all actors doing good job but I don’t really enjoy it!Was this review helpful to you?
