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.

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A VAST IMPROVEMENT ON SEASON 1

Since I didn’t enjoy Season 1 at all (I gave it an overall 3.5 with a 1.5 re-watch value), I was going to give this whole show and its second season a wide berth. BUT I’m actually glad I didn’t, because Love (ft. Marriage and Divorce) seems to have finally come into its own in Season 2. It’s a satire that mocks our modern-day conceptions of love, marriage and divorce in a world where real-life is Instagram photo-shopped within an inch of its life that the lines between reality and fantasy are now blurred. We no longer know what’s real, what’s imagined (but not impossible), and what is pure fantasy. So thanks to the C21st digital age, when it comes to romantic love, we speak of meeting “the One” or “our soulmate” whose is “our BFFs”; we have photo-shopped images of the perfect married life and the immaculate family in-tow; celebrity couples use the media to manipulate and spin a story about their imperfect personal lives; the aging couple growing old gracelessly, desperately holding off the ravishes of old age through cosmetic surgeries; and then there is the infamous “conscious uncoupling” scenario of divorced life. The unadulterated practical mundane realities of modern romantic relationships are summarily thrown out of the window. And I think it is this picture of modern romance that the writer takes a vicious and visceral axe to. And I loved it.

I’ll stand by my original feelings about this show re: Season 1. It was still flawed in my view in terms of structure, editing and pacing (and those flaws are still present in this current season), but there were nevertheless hints of it satirising our modern expectations of married life in Season 1, though its flaws tended to camouflage it. For instance, right from the get-go, the three wives set the stage for what is to come: they’ve such unrealistic views of what makes a good marriage that is based on marital fidelity, it’s only a matter of time for those views to be tested. We also have the three woman representing three types of wives: the image-driven celebrity wife made up with an ironically ridiculous Raccoon-eye get-up; the Stepford wife who, haunted by a divorce-driven childhood, takes up Proverbs 31 as her blueprint of living out the perfect noble wife; and finally the woman who sacrificed her life, inheritance and own wealthy family for an impoverished man, she ended up a 50-year-old Martyred Doormat on the altar of the traditional view of what is believed makes for the ‘perfect’ wife. And of course, there are the various reasons why a husband might stray: some of them coming from quite tragic yet still hurtful circumstances (the 50 year old professor, who having not being the main breadwinner, affects his feelings of the kind of man he traditionally believes a husband should be/ought to have been); others are purely ridiculous and stupid (the 40-year-old who has it all but for that apple as he plays Adam to Ah Mi’s tempting Eve); and yet others are due to lack of communication and unrealistic expectations from one another (the career-driven 30 year-olds who have to contend with the modern-day dilemma, stresses and struggles of having a career, maintaining a marriage, and raising children). So in this drama we have different ideas of what constitutes the ‘perfect’ marriage through the POV of four different generations over four ages: the 30 year olds, the 40 year olds, the 50 year olds and the 60s.

To its credit (at least for me), the drama comes into its own in Season 2, yet again (with its Season 1 flaws still intact) it does take its time getting there, I think. But there again, maybe that is the whole point. Just as it aims to satirise modern-day romantic expectations of an Instagram image-conscious world, it also seeks to up- end those same expectations its audience may unconsciously hold in itself. Given time, we soon discover that the joke is on us as much as it is on the characters, once we realise that this drama is not going to give us a rose-tinted view. Married life (featuring love) is messy, sometimes painful, and at times mundane. It’s hard-work, requiring patience, honesty, understanding, compromise and communication. It means being practical and realistic. It demands that we don’t take our spouses for granted. Our expectations change over a course of a married life or even within a couple of years into it. Tragically, affairs and divorce are often the last resort when it all becomes too much for some. But for this drama at least, the key is not to come to it with any expectation of a straight-forward dramatic treatment on infidelity, in which the audience is looking for revenge and retribution against the adulterous husbands and justice for their betrayed wives, which has the hallmark of a 1990s mind-set if I'm honest. Given the modern depiction to varying degrees of strong independently-minded women, with careers of their own, not even the wronged wives are looking for that, because that's just too easy for men while the women still lose out. And that’s progress of a sort, surely. So no, this was never going to be a straight-forward realist drama but a satirical one that makes fun of the whole idea of the perfect romance, love and marriage set-up while casting a disapproving eye on the way it is often handled.

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