A Love Other Than Yours K-Drama review: Hollow, cruel to its women and a waste of Seo Kang-joon and Ahn Eun-jin

A couple of episodes ago, I had patience. It was exhausting to watch everyone tying themselves into pretzels in A Love Other Than Yours, but alright, let’s give it a chance. Maybe we shouldn’t pass judgment so quickly.

The premise: A couple who have spent 10 years together and lost their zest for life, and for each other, will either find their way back or drift apart and discover what else lies in store for them. Hearts will break, but this is the era of grimly realistic Korean dramas; we’ve made our peace with that. Besides, it’s Seo Kang-joon and Ahn Eun-jin.

Oh dear goodness, I want to go back to the person I was 14 episodes ago.

After Episode 8, when leads Nam-goong (Seo Kang-joon) and Lee Mi-do, (Ahn Eun-jin) agree to see 'other people' for a month, the drama turns into a rapid trainwreck you just can’t look away from.

By this point, the show has completely abandoned Mi-do’s own struggles: her troubles at work, her weariness, her bone-deep exhaustion with life. This is a woman who began the series directing an adult film out of sheer necessity, due to an unfair lawsuit. Now the series seems determined to punish her as much as possible, all because she caught feelings for Tae-sung, a rather immature, abrasive lawyer (who doggedly pursued her, mind you).

From then on, Mi-do is either tearful or deadpan, clinging to her guilt over hurting Nam-goong, who looks hollow and dead inside even while he’s supposedly dating his junior colleague, Soo-ah (Jo A-ram). Soo-ah, by the way, is written with even less self-respect than Mi-do. She keeps declaring her love for Nam-goong, fully aware of his 10 years’ worth of baggage, and promises to keep loving him even if he returns to Mi-do, because she only wants the best for him. It’s meant to read as selflessness, but a character without any sort of personality and desires of her own, is sadly, just a plot device with a pulse.

The problem isn’t the idea of a couple finding love outside a relationship weighed down by obligation and guilt. It doesn’t make their love any less real; it was buried under their own pain and insecurities, something the early episodes captured well. There’s the fear of being a burden to each other, until the heaviness catches up and you can’t move past it without confronting it.

That is a genuinely grown-up subject, and rare for the genre. But a story about two people outgrowing each other needs them to grow, and here nobody does. The characters begin to erode.

Mi-do began as feisty and fiery, a woman worn down by life. How did she end up as a weeping centrepiece torn between two men? She continues seeing Tae-sung, in this rather half-hearted manner, while still pining for Nam-goong.

And who is Soo-ah, really, outside of Nam-goong?

Then there’s the most contrived plot point of all: the guilt itself. Nam-goong holds himself responsible for the death of Mi-do’s father, who saved him from drowning when he was seven. Mi-do, suddenly, blames herself too, because she was the one who told her father to go and save him. Even Nam-goong recognises the absurdity, telling her she can’t insult her father’s memory in such a manner.

The bigger damage is retroactive. A tragedy this neat, recasts the entire relationship as a debt being repaid, and once that’s on the table, 10 years of love start to look like 10 years of penance. The show swaps a relatable question (what happens when love gets tired?) for a melodramatic one (can you love someone you owe?), and never commits to answering either.

The ending is the final insult, because Mi-do gets no resolution at all. She’s handed an new career path, as if the writers suddenly remembered she once had one, while still sobbing violently when Nam-goong announces he’ll disappear from her life. Had you shown me this ending back in Episode 1, when the couple was still trying to rekindle the spark, I would have gently told you to go lie down in a cold, dark room.

It’s a shame, because grim realism only works when the gloom is earned. Here, misery stands in for depth, as though making everyone sadder automatically makes the story more serious. Seo Kang-joon and Ahn Eun-jin do what they can, and there are flickers of the lived-in chemistry that made the opening so promising, but no performance can supply motivation the script never wrote.

Among the K-dramas that have crashed and burned of late, A Love Other Than Yours wins the race by an explosion. It promised a mature theme, then diluted its own premise with weak writing for its women and men alike, until no one had a single distinguishing trait left by the finale. Everyone just stares out at you with hollow, dead eyes, and you, the viewer, may well find yourself staring back the same way.

The cast deserved better. So did we.