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.