A Love Other Than Yours mid-season K-Drama review: Exhausting, frustrating, still watching

The messiness is right there in the title. If you went in expecting anything other than a frustrating, exhausting rollercoaster.... that’s not on you, because the mess in this show is unprecedented.

The first episode is still the most grounded and searing. It sets up the premise: Namgung Ho (Seo Kang-joon), a cheerful assistant manager at Hunmin Confectionery, and Lee Mi-do (Ahn Eun-jin), a once-promising film director, have been together for ten years and have lived across the hall from each other for most of them.

The spark has faded. And the spark also means their passion for life, for work, and what just them...'them'. Mi-do has been unceremoniously booted off her own film, and Namgung carries his own frustrations, which he tries to hide from her.

Their problems are real and cut to the bone: The fear of being a burden, the fear of one person always carrying the other, the sense that love has started to feel like a debt. So they break up in episode one, which is probably one of the most painful scenes of the show.

Then, the next morning, out of pure habit, he makes his usual sing-song wake-up call, she answers in kind, and they both remember, a beat too late, that they’re done. That's the thing about relationships: You can tear and throw photographs, fill up dustbins, but you can't throw out a lifetime.

They met at seven and started dating at 26. Nearly, three decades of knowing each other and ten years of loving each other. And so, because their history weighs as much as their relationship, they get back with each other and decide to get married.

Yet, is that reason enough to get married? But if that isn't, what is?

And that brings us to another question the show asks best, and answers in a rather incoherent manner, reminiscent of a person trying to write an essay for an exam and pouring in what they remember: When one person has been your whole world since you were seven, your playmate, your confidant, your first and only love, have you forfeited the chance to know anyone else?

Or, more unsettling still, to know yourself without them? Mi-do’s malaise was never really about the relationship. It’s a slow leak in her whole life: The films that won’t get made, the ambition curdling into apology, the creeping sense that she has become a passenger in her own story. Namgung, meanwhile, keeps the lights on and the fridge stocked, mistaking maintenance for intimacy.

Their love is real and bone-deep, but it’s knotted up with obligation, pity and worry, a decade’s worth of feelings stuffed into a drawer neither of them dares to open. Theirs is the strange paradox of the long-haul couple: they know everything about each other and tell each other almost nothing. They can finish each other’s sentences, yet neither will say the one that matters.

Yet the drama makes only one of them say it out loud. Mi-do is allowed, even required, to be visibly messy.

She wavers, has 'feelings', and every misstep is put on screen, scrutinised and, more often than not, punished. Namgung is every bit as lost. He gets to be lost silently. His failings are real: He confuses caretaking with closeness and protecting her with protecting himself, and his magnanimous “go to him” turns out to be a wounded man’s revenge.

Yet, the show frames his flaws as devotion and his silences as sacrifice, while her unravelling reads as a defect of character. It's that old story, again.

The woman absorbs the story’s chaos so the man can remain the steady home she is expected to return to, and if she doesn't, well, will she find her own?

Her desire becomes the problem to be solved, while he stays the standard she’s measured against. What should be a portrait of two people who have hollowed each other out is told as though only one of them is hollow.

This lopsidedness shapes everyone around them. Han Tae-seung (Lee Joo-ahn) should embody everything Mi-do’s life lacks: Risk, volatility, the thrill of not knowing what comes next. Instead he plays like a diagnosis, the visible proof of how starved she is for feeling anything at all. He is immature and morally slippery, though that is almost beside the point.

He matters because he is not Namgung, and even his tragic backstory feels like a justification for his place on the board rather than an inner life. He is frustratingly obnoxious too; he tears up Namgung and Mi-do's photo in front of both of them, and Mi-do...does nothing. He is almost an aggressive caricature of an antagonist, and you're almost wondering, why Mi-Do? Why?

Park Soo-ah (Jo Ah-ram) fares worse. She is the show’s most straightforward character, honest about what she wants, and in a story that runs on suppression, directness gets mistaken for a lack of depth. She ends up as a counterweight on Namgung’s side of the scale, there to balance Tae-seung rather than to want anything for herself.

And so, the drama grows more exasperating the further it goes. Once the leads agree to date other people, the second leads stop being loved and start being used, recruited into an experiment designed to test someone else’s relationship.

You could argue it isn’t leading anyone on if those pairings eventually stand. So far, though, nothing suggests the show sees Tae-seung and Soo-ah as anything more than mirrors held up to the couple it actually cares about. The title promises a love other than yours, yet every road keeps leading back to the same hallway.

And that hallway is the real trap. The drama’s most compelling idea was that a person might need to find themselves outside a relationship before they can choose to stay in one. Instead, Mi-do’s sense of self appears to be a phase she must pass through on the way back to him, not a destination in its own right. Yet, it could still be early to say that: Maybe she finds herself, too (one can hope). The series also shows the unhealthy signs of co-dependency too; the inability to be with each other, and yet, they can't somehow be without each other too.

Nine episodes in, the show is also juggling more than it can hold: Corporate scandals, legal intrigue, childhood wounds and inherited guilt, all piled onto a premise that was strongest when it was quieter.

The pity is that the first episode understood something true about long love, that two people can be each other’s safest place and deepest rut at the same time. With five episodes left, you're wracked with confusion: Do you really want these two people to get back with each other? Or should they just be with other people?

Or maybe, just choose themselves?