My love affair with Love Affair

Last December, I posted a wish list of things I wanted for the coming year in dramaland.

I don’t want to jinx anything, but I think Secret Love Affair might just be my wish come true. It’s not much like Coffee Prince—one is a dark, indie thriller of compromised morals and bad behavior, and the other is sunshine on a stick—but both shows feel compellingly real and nuanced. And like Coffee Prince before it, I’m so wrapped up in SLA that I can barely function. 

Here are some of the Secret Love Affair points I’m pondering these days.

Whatever innocence Hye Won might once have had is long gone—she abandoned music, her first love, in favor of an administrative position that mostly finds her keeping dirty secrets for her bosses. She breaks the rules whenever they ask, whether it means rigging their college’s admissions system for financial gain, covering up their extramarital affairs, or using her parents’ personal bank accounts to hide their ill-gotten money. Her dalliance with Sun Jae, a student twenty years her junior, is just another in a long line of questionable things Hye Won has done in this show.

But Hye Won isn’t an antihero. She’s a deeply sympathetic, deeply flawed human being who has let her circumstances get the better of her. It’s excruciating and exhilarating to watch her navigate through her increasingly complicated life, armed only with steady nerves, the tactical brain of a four-star general, and maybe even a secret core of decency. There’s still a soul in that body—after all, the sheer beauty of music can bring her to tears. (Plus, she’s a saint compared to most of this show’s other characters.

Somewhere under the skin, I even see parallels between Hye Won and Coffee Prince’s Eun Chan: Both characters cross traditional boundaries between men and women. Eun Chan does this in an obvious way, dressing and wearing her hair so ambiguously that she’s usually mistaken for a boy. Physically, Hye Won is all woman, but the show is still allowing her to do things that most drama girls wouldn’t dream of. She’s a hardworking professional who’s considering cheating on her spouse with someone significantly younger than she is. (When this transgression occurred to Hye Won’s friend, she automatically assumed that Hye Won was the wronged party. No one would ever guess Hye Won herself might be the one breaking the marital bonds, both because she’s so steady and responsible and because infidelity is usually gendered male.) Hye Won doesn’t do housework or cook, she drives her own car, and she prefers clothes that are tailored and strong rather than flouncy and feminine. Heck, she’s even had her own broody shower scene, a privilege almost always reserved for Kdrama men.

Much of SLA’s tension comes from the sharp dividing lines between these groups. In the first episode, Hye Won compares her system of ethics to traffic signs you have to obey to avoid accidents. To extend that metaphor, this caste system provides the lanes on the road. This was especially obvious in episode 6 when Da Mi averted her eyes and stepped back to let a rich client pass on the stairs. It’s true that this didn’t turn out the way the client expected, but the mere fact that the girl wasn’t surprised by Da Mi’s behavior has a lot to say about how she’s used to being treated. In that moment, Da Mi might as well have been the lowest scullery maid at Downton Abbey.

And Hye Won? While her blossoming relationship with Sun Jae is dangerous, so is the rest of her lifestyle. By working so closely with the Kims, she crosses into a lane that isn’t her own every day. This means she’s always bowing and scraping, pretending to enjoy mahjong tournaments and accepting extravagant gifts that are obviously intended to buy her, body and soul. As Young Woo pointed out in the premiere, everything Hye Won has rests on her relationship with the Kims. She’s their servant just as surely as the celery-stick toting maid is hers.

It’s obvious from the very beginning that physical desire is going to play a fundamental part in this couple’s relationship. That’s incredibly rare for Korean drama, a medium that uses skinship almost exclusively as relationship marker: That single kiss or hug in a 16-episode series is what tells you the couple is really together, and it will likely never happen again. Take Spring Waltz, my favorite of the four seasons dramas. The leads begin their relationship with a kiss, but that’s it—there’s no hand-holding or physical closeness in the remaining five or six episodes. If those characters are ever physically intimate, they’re left to do it in private, without the prying eye of the camera. This is also the case in more recent shows, including Miss Korea. That drama’s lead couple got together, but as shown their relationship was almost entirely platonic.

As a commenter so aptly put it, Secret Love Affair is sex soup. Will its understanding of love as a bodily, animal experience become part of Kdrama’s ongoing narrative?

About the end. I’ve heard rumors that Secret Love Affair will only be 16 episodes long, although the big database sites like Dramawiki say 20. From the very beginning, I’ve been thinking about this show’s eventual end. (I like to torture myself, you see.)

If Secret Love Affair had aired ten years ago, Hye Won would almost certainly be headed toward unhappiness. Back then, dramas punished their shades-of-grey characters with death, as happened in the similarly adulterous 2004 series December Fever. But in today’s new era of happy endings might Hye Won finally find personal and professional fulfillment? 

If you trust Tokyo Tower, this possibility isn’t so far fetched. I could handle a Tokyo Tower ending here—Sun Jae goes off to all the European competitions Hye Won mentioned in episode six, and she joins him there after divorcing her husband and leaving her job in Korea. I’d also be happy with a modified take on the Spring Waltz finale, which would find them both happily teaching piano at a middle-of-the-road school in the countryside, not a big, prestigious college like where they are now. Or maybe the writer could go for a What’s Up Fox ending, which would see the series close with Hye Won visiting Sun Jae during his time in the military. (Perhaps bringing along their child?)

Even if my OTP doesn’t end up together, I can still imagine a happy ending for them—Hye Won ditches her husband and reclaims the piano by becoming a professional teacher, and Sun Jae dedicates himself to music until he realizes that Da Mi isn’t such a bad girl after all. The only thing I really, really don’t want is for this series to end with a bang, like What Happened in Bali. 

When it comes right down to it, I truly believe that Secret Love Affair will have a satisfying, non-tragic ending. That would be in keeping with the tradition set by A Wife’s Credentials, the last series this writer and director teamed up on.  

As far as I’m concerned, Hye Won’s journey should end with rebirth, not death.