Club Friday Love & Belief: The Seven Year Itch (2022)

This story could have been better under a different director. Not that this director isn’t good. Club Friday stories just isn’t for him.

Other than how wrong it is to treat people like pieces in the MC’s “love game”, other important topics were left mostly untouched and unaddressed in any meaningful way. They were set up in episode 1 and never to be spoken of again for the rest of the story. This director has the same problem in a previous Club Friday story, Broken Anniversary. He’ll tackle one or two topics (usually the unsavory ones) and barely focuses on or completely disregards the meaningful ones.

From her first relationship, problems included self-fulfillment prophecy, lack of communication, lack of knowledge about what makes a healthy relationship and most of all, lack of self-awareness and responsibility. None of these topics were meaningfully addressed after they were presented in episode 1. Well, Japan does in a 5-10m dialogue, and boy, the director did the same thing in Broken Anniversary in that those meaningful topics are addressed in a ~5 minute dialogue by someone. That's it. Hours of story and those topics get a ~5m dialogue.

The MC went from going to an all-girls school to being in her first relationship that lasted 7 years. She essentially went from living in one bubble right into another one. One of the problems that was a major cause of that relationship not working out is a lack of open communication. If anyone knows anything about relationships, you know communication is important. She didn’t want to talk about any possible problems in the relationship, because she was afraid of the “7 year curse” (hello self-fulfillment prophecy) while the guy, most likely out of love and not wanting to be confrontational, just went along with it until the bubble burst. That is what happens when you don’t communicate in a relationship. You are okay with it in the beginning and can overlook things because you love the person, but after a while, no one is able to maintain that. Communication needs to start early on and maintained throughout the relationship for it to have any chance of surviving.

Then you have the MC’s lack of self-awareness and responsibility. Instead of being honest with herself and reflecting on what went wrong in her relationship, she blames it on this 7 year curse. And so in order to protect herself from it, she comes up with this mess of a love game.

Finally, her wanting to be in a relationship for the sake of being in a relationship. She was always pursuing it without giving herself the time to learn and heal from the previous one. I don’t feel like she genuinely loved either Leng or Japan. I think this is a big issue many people actually unknowingly go through. But unfortunately, this wasn’t addressed in any meaningful way either. Not even in the end quotes.

So many important topics here, but the director and or story writers chose to mainly focus on the love game. What a shame.

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