I started watching this show out of zero expectation for anything light-hearted, knowing that it's a melodramatic, most likely dark and controversial like "Secret love affair". It didn't disappoint! The acting was superb and the characters were complex and three-dimensional. It's not a story for the faint of heart. It requires maturity and appreciation for the inherently flawed beauty of the human condition. If you're looking for a light-hearted, superficial idealistic love story in this drama, move on and watch another one. This drama isn't so much for entertaining purposes as it is to stir up the depth of emotions in the inherently flawed nature of human experience. All the characters have strengths and weaknesses, internal conflicts which they struggle to resolve throughout the drama. The whole story is full of internal angst and strife, which makes one wonder how much self-torture they can persist to continue doing to themselves and others. Yet in some way they are all relatable as human beings.

The story moves very slowly yet very quickly at the same time. It is as if their emotions are capsulized yet have endured changes of time as well. The forbidden romance of a teenage boy turns into the self-torture and self-sacrifice of a man who continues his path of redemption when he doesn't need one.

Maybe because I'm a Westerner and too open-minded for kdrama but I didn't see anything wrong with Hwan's love for his school teacher and subsequently sister-in-law. The fact that he had so much self-restraint to sacrifice everything for her and his family is as pure and idealized as you can get from any character (in some ways, this is probably the most unrealistic part of the story). The flawed and selfish love of the other characters in the story stands in contrast to Hwan's sacrifice and purity, yet his love for her and his family seems most unpure because of society's superficial moral judgments. If anything is sacrificed in this love story, it is the purity of love in the name of moral values, when all those acting as if moral were all out for themselves. Ye Ji's mother is branded the same way when everything she did was in the name of love and self-sacrifice.

This drama is a mess. It's a beautiful mess that challenges the dominant narrative of society's superficial surface relationships and dwells into the complexity of being human: inherently selfish, flawed and capable of immense beauty and selflessness as the same time.