Why My Lovely Sam Soon is still relevant today - Part 5

The madness ends when Jin-heon recognises the edge of the cliff regarding how close he is to losing Sam-soon.  He does a U-turn on his denials and a U-turn in the direction he was driving from.  Rushing back to the hotel, Jin-heon decides he’s taking no more chances and admits to Sam-soon that he loves her.  Or rather, he confesses to liking her.  Only, one wonders, what level of ‘liking’ causes so much misery, generates so much emotional anxiety, and goes to such lengths to be with that other person.  Semantics, semantics. This man is in love, not like.  Why was that so hard?  As Sam-soon tells him: If you like someone, you like them; if you don’t, you don’t.  He does, and he’s ready to commit to her.  What a bloody saga! 

There’s no way the path of true love will run smoothly for this couple.  That deep relationship they have will be tested again, I warrant, or what’s the point of having it?  To start, Hee-jin will not walk away without a fight.  Except she chooses to challenge Sam-soon rather than face Jin-heon.  I’m always baffled by this action, mostly used by women, I believe.  If he is cheating on you, why do you approach the other woman?  Deal with his sorry ass and either forgive him or leave him.  But maybe the point is, if he doesn’t know that you know he is cheating and you can get rid of the other woman, you can live the lie that it never happened.  The prize for keeping him with you is a lifetime of denial but, hey, for some, it’s a prize worth winning.  So, in begging the other woman to walk away from her man, in Hee-jin’s ‘Jolene’[1] moment, she is admitting she knows that Jin-heon’s heart has left her. 

Now.  After all that denial by Jin-heon about his feelings for Sam-soon, he enters a different type of dilemma -- it’s time to end the relationship he almost destroyed his life over.  Procrastination over everything except finding ways to be close to Sam-soon seems to be a real problem for Jin-heon.  So, ending things with Hee-jin doesn’t happen until he is pushed to yet another cliff edge by Sam-soon.  How does she do it?  She walks away from him, in silence, and in physical distance.  She ignores his calls, his pleas to come back to work, even to talk to him.  She disappears to an unknown place, leaving Jin-heon desperate and openly pining for her.  It is not Sam-soon’s intention to distress him, nor is it a clever strategy to bring him to account.  It is an endeavour to save herself.  Her survival instinct kicks in and takes charge.  A plan is to move on with her life alone (again). 

It’s what we all do when the time to let go of the past arrives.  It’s what we do when, no matter how much the hurt still hurts, we understand that the only one able to save us is ourselves, and to do so, we must focus ahead only.  One has to recalibrate not only our position with the ex but also with our friends and family.  They’ve gotten used to you as one half of a couple and you have to re-educate how they see you going forward.   Easier said than done, truly.  But with no choice, like the rest of us, Sam-soon embarks on an adventure she hopes will wash away those memories, thereby enabling her to start creating new ones, hopefully with a new love in her life.  Jin-heon underestimated Sam-soon’s ability to walk away from him both before and after the love contract.  Now we see Sam-soon underestimate his determination to hang on to her.  Jin-heon takes time to reach big decisions, but once reached, he will move mountains to make it happen, acquire it, hold on to it.  In this case, he literally climbs Mt. Hallasan on Jeju Island to reach Sam-soon. 

In his haste, he gets to the top before her.  As ever, Jin-heon is happy to wait for Sam-soon, which he does in driving wind and rain.  The Jin-heon that usually butts heads with Sam-soon seems to have disappeared.  This version is considerate, soft-spoken, passionate, and fully committed.  Not a total surprise, really, as we saw this Jin-heon briefly back when the fake relationship was infused with genuine emotion, that kiss at the piano, and everything that led up to it.  This Jin-heon is attentive, amorous, openly desiring Sam-soon physically.  Again, what a bloody saga, and what a waste of so much time.  In contrast, this Sam-soon is less easy to manage, and she demands no-sex until she loses some weight.  It’s a good thing Jin-heon has that great capacity to just wait and wait for Sam-soon.  Even lying beside her, hormones raging (he’s not happy but) he’s agreeable. It’s shocking, refreshing, burst out laughing worthy, and so typical of this drama that the conversation between Sam-soon and Jin-heon about sex is undisguised and practical. Just keeping it real, one could say.

Sharing a bed, they must also be sharing body heat. They are most definitely both physically tempted.  Sam-soon is afraid she will give in to him and tells him so.  Jin-heon’s response is an attempt to weaken her resolve further: “I’ll let you do whatever you want”. 

There’s no pretense about where this relationship wants to be, but there are also practicalities to keep things under control.  The shocking thing is not the language the lovers use, but that for its time pre-marital sex was only whispered about so it could be pretended it did not happen; a pretense that was widely participated in.  Still, it is refreshing to see that things haven’t changed, that our hormones still control our urges, that we give in to those urges but can also control them.  Typical of this drama, it’s not afraid to be censored by its audience for its real-life exposés of the bedroom talk between couples. 

Also, until he finishes with Hee-jin, there’s no moving forward. Sam-soon has reached her limit and will not compromise on this one.  Like Jin-heon, Sam-soon is all or nothing about matters of the heart.  He understands this and knows that on this one, she will not change her mind.  He accepts the condition with grace.

Ending the relationship with Hee-jin is both poignant and painful to watch.  However, Hee-jin should not have been surprised, and she wasn’t.  That said, it made it no less difficult for her to accept.  Does he love Sam-soon?  Again and again, she asks.  It is a question that perhaps she should have asked at least three occasions earlier.  He keeps thinking about Sam-soon.  He misses Sam-soon.  He’s happy when he’s with Sam-soon.  If those answers don’t break your heart, then you never really loved him.  In dissecting those three statements, one has to consider that each positive it says about Sam-soon is a negative statement about his feelings for Hee-jin.  She argues that it’s a passing phase, that he’ll get tired of this new love, that it’s not a sufficient reason to leave her, Yoo Hee-jin.  She may have forgotten many things about Jin-heon, but her absence from him has been sustained by the knowledge of how steadfast and committed a person he is.  Those very characteristics are what caused her to believe their love would endure through anything.  What she did not factor in was time. And the possibility of another heart beating in unison with the new version of the man she left behind.

Time is a force that consistently demands attention.  It dictates its own pace and is responsible for the outcome of our lives.  Time requires that you live through it if you are to survive. Or that you at least survive it if you are to continue living. It is a medium that puts you in the driving seat but never lets you take the wheel.  Working hand in hand with fate and destiny, time makes us observers rather than controllers of our lives.  Along the way, time changes you.  Our estranged lovers suspended living for three years, only to return to a world that didn’t wait for them.  Instead, they learnt the power of time passing, that it’s not possible to truly capture what is lost.

Having criticised Jin-heon for not making a decision fast enough between Sam-soon and Hee-jin, perhaps we should be reassessing our haste and considering that he should have taken more time to reach a decision.  In the end, did Jin-heon do what his heart wanted him to or did he do what he felt he should do?  From subsequent events, it’s clear that his heart is calling for Sam-soon.  A loyal man, however, it is also pushing him pushing him back to Hee-jin.  His error was not that he chose the wrong person but, rather, that he chose based on faulty reasoning.  Jin-heon stopped living, simply going through the motions whilst he waited for Hee-jin’s return.  Like Hee-jin, he believed that their past love, despite the heartache it left him with, was strong enough to be resurrected when the time came.  Like Hee-jin, also, he did not factor in the consequence of absence on the heart. 

However.  In addition, unlike Hee-jin, Jin-heon needed to calculate the impact of Sam-soon on his life.  From their first formal meeting, this man felt compelled to interfere in, follow around, make demands of this stranger that by a flunk of fate had turned up at his mother’s hotel for a job.  An obsessive-compulsive, he nonetheless carried her to his home in her soiled and smelly clothing, cleaned up after her, and ensured that she could present herself at work the next day looking decent.  He did not flinch when she spat rice in his face. (My obsessive-compulsive triggers are mild (we all have them), but someone spitting in my face -- accident or not -- would really push my ability to stay calm.)  In the past, Jin-heon has followed Sam-soon around for hours, listened to her woes for hours, put up with her hitting him, and even convinced a crowd of strangers that he is going to propose to her. 

Jin-heon is like a man waking from a long sleep.  Sam-soon referred to him as a prince.   If Sam-soon is his princess charming, her job was a hard one, but with patience, she woke him up to the joys of living.  Jin-heon overcame his fear of driving because of Sam-soon. Through Sam-soon’s tender care and their shared trust, Jin-heon at last cried away his grief over the accident that crippled him in every way.  He watched as his niece embraced Sam-soon’s imagination and learnt to use her voice again after three years of silence.  Because of Sam-soon, Jin-heon learnt to smile again, put away the constant guilt he had been carrying, care enough about someone to stand up to his mother’s dating tyranny.  Together with Sam-soon, Jin-heon learnt to trust someone deeply, learnt to covet someone’s love and attention even more deeply.  In a different, healthier way, he learnt again what it is to feel bereft if away from that person because they have become so much an essential part of his life.  Jin-heon learnt to care more about someone else than himself again, so that whenever Sam-soon was upset, he tempered his own anger and sought to calm her.  When she was hurt, he needed to care for her, be with her, stay with her until he felt she was safe again.  If those are not the many, many symbols of love, then goodness knows what they are.  If those are not the same symbols of love today, then what are they?

Now, as then, the path to true love will always encounter ripples.  Indeed, it must if we are to stay aware and caring of what we have hard won. So, the same way we work to reassure the one we love that we remain committed, they must do the same towards us.  Sometimes, we cannot help but to doubt both ourselves and them.  However, fully overcoming those doubts is more harmful to the relationship than having them.  Because, like Hee-jin found out, assuming and relying on that level of confidence in someone else can only lead to failure.  It doesn’t mean that they will let us down.  What we must protect against is letting ourselves down by causing them to lose confidence in us.  Nothing breaks up a relationship more quickly or effectively than taking someone for granted.  My Lovely Sam Soon,[2] ends with Sam-soon having those exact worries.  Ultimately, however, she concludes, rightly, that what will be will be.  As long as she continues to work hard to expressing her love for Jin-heon, she must trust that he will do the same with her.  We must ensure always, as Sam-soon’s father advises, that we not turn our backs on the past, that we live in the present, and that we not worry about the future. 

Leonora

Asiandramaobserver@gmail.com

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[1] Dolly Parton, Jolene: Dolly Parton – Jolene Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

[2] Ji Soo-hyun, My Lovely Kim Sam Soon. Kim Sa-hyun MBC, 2005. Rakuten Viki, https://www.viki.com//tv/1476c-my-lovely-sam-soon