Because This Is My First Life, and the Contract That Had to End Before It Could Be True

One evening in the middle of the series, a young wife comes home from her husband’s parents’ house after a day of work she never agreed to. It was the day of a family ancestral rite. She went to pay her respects and stayed to run the errands, peel the fruit, fry the savoury pancakes for the offering table and keep the elders company. Her husband was not there. Afterwards he does what their arrangement tells him is fair. He pays her for her time.

He means it fairly. It wounds her, and he does not understand why. She does not want the money. She wants the same work back, hour for hour: six hours, alone, at her own family’s house. That is how a man who has not taken a single day’s leave since he joined his company comes to spend his first one making kimchi with his wife’s relatives in Namhae, where she grew up, and drinking far more of their makgeolli than he meant to, because he cannot find a way to refuse it.

The woman is Yoon Ji-ho, thirty, an assistant screenwriter who lost her home when her younger brother’s pregnant girlfriend moved into the flat they shared. The man is Nam Se-hee, thirty-eight, who lives with a cat and a thirty-year mortgage and has no intention of marrying. They are married because it suited them. She needed somewhere to live. He needed a tenant who would not get in his way, and a wife on paper to stop his parents asking. They wrote their terms down: two years, and then a divorce they had agreed in advance.

In Japan the series was billed as a Korean version of The Full-Time Wife Escapist, the Japanese series in which a woman becomes a man’s wife under contract, and it does share that series’ premise. It does not share its thesis. The contract here turns out to govern very well what passes between two people, and to have no hold at all on everything else a marriage brings with it: a thirty-year mortgage, two sets of parents, an ancestral rite. What Ji-ho is owed after that rite cannot be settled with money, only by the other person standing where she stood. And when love makes the contract’s first premise untrue, the honest thing to do with a contract is to end it.

Because This Is My First Life does not end with a wedding. The wedding came early, and was for their parents. It ends with a clause; which one, and how the series gets there, can wait until after the note below. This essay’s argument is that a clause like that is worth something only where walking out was real.

This essay discusses the whole series, including how it ends. It also mentions, plainly and without detail, an attempted sexual assault, sexual harassment at work and a pregnancy lost long ago. If you would rather watch first, do; the essay will keep.

The series was written by Yoon Nan-joong and directed by Park Joon-hwa, and ran in sixteen episodes on the Korean cable channel tvN, on Monday and Tuesday nights from 9 October to 28 November 2017. Jung So-min plays Ji-ho and Lee Min-ki plays Se-hee; Esom, Kim Ga-eun, Park Byung-eun and Kim Min-seok play the friends whose loves run alongside theirs.

The Korean title means, roughly, ‘because this life is my first’. Before the premiere the writer explained it. When a child gets something wrong, she said, we tell it that it is all right, it is the first time, and nobody says that to adults, although twenty and thirty and forty are first times too. She wanted to show the generation born in 1988, Ji-ho’s generation, as plainly and honestly as she could, and hoped the series might be a small channel between generations. It is told mostly in Ji-ho’s voice. For ten episodes the narration is hers alone.

The story, in outline. Ji-ho graduated from Seoul National University and has spent five poorly paid years as an assistant screenwriter. She has never had a boyfriend. On her thirtieth birthday she has nowhere to live, and through a friend she finds a room in a townhouse whose owner she takes for a woman. The landlord, Se-hee, has taken her for a man. He is the chief designer at a company that makes a dating app, and he asks nothing of anyone but the rent. When the mistake comes out she moves on, and within a short time she has lost the next room and her work as well, for reasons that have a section of their own below. She is on the bus home to Namhae when Se-hee comes after her with the script she left behind, and she accepts the proposal he has made: a two-year contract marriage.

They marry, for their families’ sake, at a wedding they had meant to skip, live as landlord and tenant, and grow close, while two of Ji-ho’s school friends, Yang Ho-rang and Woo Su-ji, work out marriage alongside them. How the contract ends, and what replaces it, is told in the second half of this essay.

The series was not screened for this essay. Its story is taken from tvN’s own episode previews and character notes, from the synopses two Japanese broadcasters published when they showed it, and from Korean press reports and interviews from the weeks it was on air. Every line of dialogue below is paraphrased, never quoted as exact.

The broadcaster’s own character notes introduce the two of them in terms of property. Ji-ho’s line is that she envies snails, because nobody can throw a snail out of its house. Se-hee is house-poor, a man whose home is his as far as the front door, and his line is that the only things he can manage in this life are the house and the cat. The production’s statement of intent is blunter still. Its man will be paying off his loan for thirty years; its woman has lived a tenant’s life, packing her bags every two years. He hates to see a room stand empty and wants rent for it. She needs somewhere to live, now, on what she has. So, the statement says, the two of them make use of the institution called marriage, each for their own ends, in order to go on living freely as people who are not married.

That is the series’ joke and its premise. They marry in order to stay single. Their terms are settled the way housemates settle a lease. The marriage will last two years and end in a divorce by agreement. The cost of family occasions will be shared. Neither will intrude on the other’s life. The first principle of the whole thing, they agree, is efficiency and rationality. A marriage that lasts two years, for a woman who has packed her bags every two years, runs on a tenant’s clock.

Se-hee’s notes give him a theory of why none of it should matter. The company he works for makes a dating app whose Korean name is a contraction of ‘dating, not marriage’. Blind dates, to him, are a one-to-one matching auction steeped in the market; dating is the cooling-off period before marriage during which returns are accepted; marriage is a coercive social institution for producing children. A contract suits a man who thinks like that. It lets him take the two things he needs from marriage, the rent and his parents’ silence, and decline the rest.

The series was made between two rounds of Statistics Korea’s Social Survey, which asks people aged thirteen and over whether one should marry. In 2016, 12.5 percent said one must and 39.3 percent that it was better to; 42.9 percent said it was fine either way. In 2018 the first two answers stood at 11.1 and 37.0 percent, together less than half, and the answer that either was fine had risen to 46.6. By 2024 the two answers in favour stood at 16.4 and 36.1 percent, together more than half again, so this is not a line anyone should extend with a ruler. The figures record opinions, not lives, and say nothing about why. What they show is a question that, in the years this series was written, had become open.

The same year produced another Seoul story about a woman and a room, with an actor in common. In Jeon Go-woon’s Microhabitat, Esom, who plays Su-ji here, is a woman who gives up her room rather than the small things that make her life her own. Ji-ho makes the opposite trade, and gives up the form of a single life, on paper, to keep a room. Neither story treats its heroine’s bargain as foolish.

The contract had a clause about the cost of family occasions and none about the families. They arrive anyway. With some difficulty the two of them persuade both sets of parents to let them skip the wedding, and at the first meeting of the two families Ji-ho’s mother overturns the agreement: she will not send her daughter off like that. So there is a wedding after all. Asked by his friend what kind he wants, Se-hee asks for one so short and ordinary that nobody will remember it. Ji-ho’s dress is borrowed and his wedding clothes are an ordinary suit, and on the morning itself she catches a bus to the hall in her dress, with a trench coat over it.

It is at this wedding, meant to be forgettable, that the arrangement first stops being only an arrangement. In her new husband’s bag Ji-ho finds a family album and a letter her mother has put there for him. The letter begins with an apology for the hard time her daughter has had, with a mother like her, and then asks him for two things: that if Ji-ho ever wants to write again, he let her write; and that because once she starts crying she cannot easily stop, he stay beside her when she does. Ji-ho sinks down in her dress and weeps, and before the ceremony has even begun he has kept the second request.

It is a loving letter and a telling one, and a series about a contract invites us to read it as a document too. In the whole arrangement it is the only clause about Ji-ho’s own future, and it is in her mother’s handwriting, addressed to the husband, phrased as a favour. That is the form such clauses took in the mother’s world. The broadcaster’s notes describe Ji-ho’s father as a guardian of patriarchy who puts sons before daughters. He took it for granted that a girl would go to a teachers’ college; Ji-ho, who loved literature, applied elsewhere without telling him and left for Seoul by night before term began. Her mother can put her daughter’s terms only as a request to the next man. The series lets that request stand, and spends the rest of its length moving the pen.

The families come back in the tenth episode, which a Korean entertainment report previewed with a slang coinage for a husband’s family and the world it rules: Ji-ho, it said, would now see for herself the place she had only heard about. Se-hee’s mother, the notes say, has long dreamed of being a mother-in-law who is a friend to her son’s wife. She has been married for nearly forty years to a man who promised her that her hands would never be dry of dishwater but that she would never have to worry about a living, and kept his word on both; he has treated her all that time like a stern schoolmaster, and she has spent the marriage feeling told off. She calls Ji-ho to the family’s ancestral rite. Ji-ho goes to pay her respects and finds herself, before she knows it, running errands, peeling fruit and frying pancakes for the offering table, playing a daughter-in-law’s part that, as the same report pointed out, appeared nowhere in the contract’s clauses. Se-hee hears about it late and hurries over.

None of that would surprise a reader of “How Holiday Rituals Turn Intimacy Back Into Roles”. That essay argued that a private arrangement between two people is legible only to the two of them, while a ritual has an audience that knows exactly how every part should be played, and audiences do not negotiate. People who have renegotiated everything at home find themselves back in the old roles within an hour of arriving. Ji-ho’s contract is the purest private arrangement there is, drafted and signed. It lasts until she walks into the kitchen.

What the series adds is the aftermath, and two wrong answers to it, both of them Se-hee’s. The first is a question: why did she not hold her ground, and why did she go at all? The second is the more interesting mistake. He pays her. By the logic of their agreement it is scrupulous; her hours went to his family, so he makes them good. And the logic is exactly what wounds. The money settles the matter. It turns a day she spent inside his family into a transaction between the two of them, closed, with nothing owing on either side and nothing left to understand.

Ji-ho’s answer is the series’ best idea. She does not refuse to be made good. She changes the currency. He will repay her the same way, with work, at her family’s house, for the same hours, alone. So he goes, and finds out what she could not have told him. The work is harder than he imagined and the older women’s dialect nearly defeats him, and when it is done her relatives pour him makgeolli and he drinks too much of it, because the easy refusal he uses everywhere else has deserted him. When she asks why he did not simply say no, as he usually does, he hears his own question coming back to him, and understands, a Korean press account of the episode reports, how she must have felt. The holiday-rituals essay had already said it: refusal inside a ritual, with a family looking on, is not the same act as refusal between two people, and it costs more. Se-hee has to learn it on his feet.

In that episode the narration, which has been Ji-ho’s alone, is for the first time Se-hee’s as well, and the series reaches for a poem, Chung Hyun-jong’s The Visitor: that someone’s coming is in fact an enormous thing, because a person arrives with a past and a present and a future, a whole life, and with a heart that breaks easily and may already have been broken. It is a love line. It is also the truest thing the series says about the contract. They had drafted it as though two people were arriving. Each arrived with a family, a rite, a table to set, and relatives whose drink a guest cannot refuse.

Two years later a Korean film stood in that kitchen too. In Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, a young mother cooks and cleans through the Chuseok holiday at her in-laws’ house and at last speaks up for herself in her own mother’s voice. This series is lighter, and it stands on the other side of the same door. It asks what the husband should do about the kitchen afterwards. Its answer, which is not money, may be the most useful thing in it.

The comparison with the Japanese series is worth making exactly, because the two are so often put side by side. This Library read that series in “The Full-Time Wife Escapist and What Becomes Visible When a Relationship Admits It Has Terms”. There the contract is a job: the wife is employed, with a wage, days off and a written account of her role. The essay’s finding was that the contract did not add terms to a marriage but removed a disguise from terms every marriage already has, and so made them negotiable. Its sharpest point was about love. Reclassify the same work as affection and it becomes unpaid, and hard even to mention; a price, it argued, is what keeps a term discussable.

Nothing in this series refutes that. But its contract is not a job. It is a tenancy, which Korean reports on the series called a monthly-rent marriage, and the money runs the other way: here the wife is the tenant. The question is different too. That essay asked what love does to a wage. This series asks what a contract can hold, and its answer is everything that passes between the two people who signed it and nothing that comes with them. The terms that do the damage were never hidden inside the marriage waiting to be revealed. They were outside it, in a mortgage, a mother’s wish, a mother-in-law’s dream, a rite with its table and its order of service, and they walked in.

And when the damage comes, the series tries a price and finds its limit. Se-hee pays. In that kitchen a price does not keep anything discussable. It ends the discussion, which is exactly why it hurts. Ji-ho’s demand for the same hours of the same kind of work is not a rejection of terms. It is a better term. It asks for symmetry instead of settlement, and symmetry, unlike a fee, cannot be discharged without understanding. Nobody stands where someone else stood for six hours and comes away knowing nothing.

There is a second difference, and it arrives later. In the Japanese series, as that essay read it, the contract removes a disguise. In this one the contract becomes the disguise. By the time Ji-ho loves Se-hee, the most untrue sentence in their house is the one they wrote down, that they are landlord and tenant and nothing more. The earlier essay was right that writing terms down makes them negotiable. This series adds that written terms can go on being honoured after they have stopped being true, and that a contract honoured past that point is a lie of its own.

It would be easy to tell Ji-ho’s story as a romance with a career in the background, and the series does not. She loved literature and went to Seoul, against her father’s plans, to study it. While her classmates went to large companies and law schools she became an assistant writer on daily dramas, badly paid and not resentful, because writing was what made her happy. Jung So-min, who plays her, said after the series ended that Ji-ho chose the work for no other reason than that she loved it, and that she recognised herself there: her own father had opposed her decision to study acting.

At thirty her chance to debut as a writer falls through, and she is still treated as an assistant. For a time she lives in a workroom that a fellow assistant director found for her, and she loses it when he tries to sexually assault her. When the writer she works under apologises to her, and the apology turns out to be the groundwork for a forced reconciliation with that man, Ji-ho will not have it, and she gives up the profession she has spent five years on.

The series places all of this directly before the proposal, and this essay will not read it as a step towards him. It is a man’s violence, and a workplace that would rather smooth it over, and what it costs her is her work. The love story does not repair that. What repair there is comes more slowly, and it belongs to her.

Later she learns that a draft of her own is being turned into a new production by the writer she worked under and by that same assistant director. When a production company offers her work, she tells its head that before she begins, the matter of the assistant director has to be settled. The company belongs to Se-hee’s first love, Go Jung-min, and Se-hee, a Korean report on the episode records, asks her to look at Ji-ho as a writer and not as his wife. It is a small scene and a telling one: a man’s part in a woman’s career, here, is to take himself out of it.

Ji-ho’s voice runs through the whole series, in a narration the Korean press singled out episode after episode. At the end she is writing dramas. Her mother’s letter asked a husband to let her write. By the last scene nobody is letting her do anything.

Jung So-min also said that what she took from the character was a habit: when something unfair happens, saying at the time that it hurt, instead of burying it and exploding later. It is a modest thing to learn from a romantic comedy. It is also exactly what Ji-ho does with the money after the rite.

Ji-ho’s school friends carry the series’ other positions on marriage, and the series takes both of them more seriously than their first descriptions suggest. Yang Ho-rang wants to be a wife and a mother. Before the premiere the production described her with a Korean coinage that joins the words for getting a job and for marrying into a husband’s family, which is to say marriage as a career, and her character notes have her explaining, at eighteen, that she will never marry a rich man’s son, because inherited money comes with a daughter-in-law’s servitude to his parents included. She is not naive about the kitchen. She planned around it.

After seven years her boyfriend, Sim Won-seok, whose start-up is struggling, asks her to wait five more before they marry. She will not wait on those terms, and they part. Kim Ga-eun, who plays her, put it plainly after the series ended: Ho-rang did not want simply to wait for him; she wanted to prepare a future with him. In the end, on her initiative, they marry after all. The ending does not mock her dream. It lets her set its terms.

Woo Su-ji is the one with no plans to marry at all; the broadcaster’s notes call her, cheerfully, an aggressive non-marrier. She is capable and blunt and has always wanted to run a company of her own, and she stays in a well-paid job at a large firm because her mother depends on her, putting up with the harassment of the men around her. When Ma Sang-goo falls for her, she will date him only on conditions she sets out first, and the series’ own publicity called theirs a contract relationship. Then she learns that the men in her office have made her body the subject of a bet. She calls the ringleader, an assistant manager named Park, and demands a formal apology for the sexual harassment she has put up with. Her mother, who knows why she stayed, tells her it is time to fly, for her mother’s share as well. By the last episode Su-ji has left the firm and started her own business, making underwear.

Go Jung-min could easily have been written as a rival. The sources describe something else. She runs a drama production company, and it is her company that offers Ji-ho the way back to writing. As students she and Se-hee lived together; she became pregnant and lost the pregnancy, and his father’s refusal to accept them ended the relationship. This essay blames no one for that loss. Years later she apologises for what she said when they parted, and he tells her not to carry it. And it is Jung-min, as Se-hee remembers her, who puts into words the idea the ending depends on: that words reach another person’s heart only when they are said out loud.

What joins these women is not a verdict on marriage. Ho-rang wants it, Su-ji does not, and Jung-min lost the chance of it young. What joins them is the question the series keeps asking of Ji-ho: who wrote the terms you are living by, and can you write any of them yourself?

The contract’s first premise was that they were landlord and tenant and nothing more, and for a long time Se-hee defends it scrupulously. After the wedding Ji-ho notices that he has started to say ‘we’, and finds she is happier about it than she expected. When she turns up at his office in the part of his wife, and when she gives his cat a name, Uri, which in Korean also means ‘we’, he draws the line: anything more than landlord and tenant is not what they agreed. Hurt, she throws the name tag she made for the cat into the bin.

He keeps it. Weeks later, on the evening he means to tell her how he feels, he puts it on the cat. That is the evening she tells him she wants to end the contract.

Her reasons are worth hearing, because the easy reading gets them wrong. She has not stopped loving him. She has learned about Jung-min and the pregnancy they lost, and she can see what that past is still doing to him, and a marriage entered without love has become, now that she loves him, a false description of what they are. A Korean report on the episode put it simply: she ends the live-in marriage she began without love at the moment she has come to love him for real. She knows he is about to say something and gives no sign of it, so that he can settle his old wound first. It is not a retreat. It may be the most exact thing anyone in the series does with a contract. She stops honouring terms that have stopped being true.

On the contract’s last day they shake hands, as they did when they first met, and wish each other well. He has a great deal to say and says none of it, and he does not try to stop her. She leaves on a journey of her own. And he puts the house on the market: the house his notes call the only worldly thing he ever wanted, sold because he can no longer sleep in it, eat in it or live in it, with every corner full of her. When she comes back to tell him what she feels, strangers are living there.

Months later they find each other again, both living in borrowed rooftop rooms, she in Ho-rang’s and he in Won-seok’s. He is angry that she stayed silent, and at last he says how much he missed her. It has taken the whole series, and the sale of a house, for the man whose notes allowed him only a house and a cat to say a sentence with no clause in it.

They do not go back to the old contract. The finale, as Korean reports described it the next morning, has them begin a new one, with love as its first priority, to be renewed every year. Two of its clauses were quoted in those reports, and both are worth reading slowly. The right to their home is to be shared equally, half each. And on the big family holidays each of them spends the time with his or her own family.

Each clause answers a wound. The first answers the house: his, mortgaged, the reason for the whole arrangement, sold because he could not live in it without her. The second answers the rite. A couple who spend the holidays each at their own parents’ table have written the daughter-in-law’s kitchen out of their marriage, by agreement and in advance, which is where the holiday-rituals essay said such things have to be settled, before the role starts running. Neither clause is about romance. Both are about where each of them will stand.

The yearly renewal is the part people remember, and it is easy to make it too sweet. This Library argued in “Chosen Again, Not Chosen Once” that the paperwork of a marriage documents a decision that has to be made again, in small ways, on ordinary days, for as long as the marriage lasts. The series turns that thought into a clause with a date on it. But it adds a condition that essay did not need to state, and that condition is the reason this essay has told the story in the order it has.

A renewal means something only if not renewing is real. This Library’s reading of Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own as a Condition for Intimacy, Not Only Creativity”, put the principle without softening it: a woman who cannot leave cannot consent to staying. Ji-ho signed the first contract with nowhere to live and a bus to her parents’ house as the alternative. She signs the second after she has left. She has ended a marriage that suited her circumstances, lost the room that was its reason, and lived for months in a friend’s rooftop room without him. The renewal clause is worth something because the exit was real.

That is the difference between the first contract and the last, and it is not the difference between a fake marriage and a real one. Both are contracts. The first was drafted out of need, and around it everyone else’s terms walked in. The last is drafted by two people who have each stood where the other was made to stand, and signed by a woman who has shown that she can walk out. Three years on, she is writing dramas, and they sign it again.

In Japan the series goes by Kono koi wa hajimete dakara, which turns the Korean ‘this life’ into ‘this love’. It is an understandable choice, and it undersells the series. The Korean title is about a life, and so is the series: a room, a job, a debt, two families, a friend’s rooftop. Love is one of the many things in it that nobody knows how to do the first time.

When Aichi Television, on weekday mornings, and TVQ Kyushu Broadcasting in Fukuoka showed it in the autumn of 2024, the broadcasters introduced it as a series that had been billed as a Korean version of The Full-Time Wife Escapist, and named the questions it raised: people turning away from marriage, the difficulty of finding work, and harassment by people with power over others. Those are fair headings. This essay would add one that travels more directly than any of them. The families.

A Korean ancestral rite and a Japanese memorial service are different things, and nobody should pretend otherwise; the Japanese synopsis of that episode simply calls the rite a memorial service. But the shape of the episode will be familiar in some Japanese households: a wife who goes to her husband’s family for a memorial or a New Year visit and within the hour is in the kitchen, and a husband who was not there to see it. The series’ remedy travels because it is so plain. Not payment, which closes the matter. Not a lecture about refusing, which ignores what refusing costs in someone else’s family. The same work, the other way round.

For a woman living in Japan who has married into a family not her own, perhaps in a second language, the part of marriage that no document covers can be the hardest to read. What the family expects, and of whom, is rarely said aloud, and the one person who could say it is the partner who grew up inside it. The series’ small test is worth borrowing. Does he know, from the inside, what his family asks of you? Has he ever stood there himself?

What a contract like Ji-ho and Se-hee’s would mean in law, in Korea or in Japan, is a question for a lawyer; the series does not answer it and neither does this essay. What the series does claim is narrower and harder to argue with: that the terms two people write will be tested by terms they did not write, and that the test tends to come at a family table.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong, and the first comes from the man who directed the series.

While it was on air Park Joon-hwa said that however faithfully a drama renders a hard reality, it needs a hopeful code, something close to fantasy, and that what mattered most to him was the warmth that grows up in the characters’ relationships. On that account the yearly renewal is not an argument about contracts at all. It is the fantasy the hard reality was always going to be given, a tidy clause to end on, and this essay has built a theory on a ribbon.

Second, the exit this essay praises was affordable. Ji-ho could leave because a friend had a rooftop room to lend, and Se-hee could sell a house. A great many people cannot walk out of an arrangement to find out whether they want it back, and a reading that makes the worth of a commitment depend on the freedom to leave it may be describing a privilege. The concession is real. The narrower claim survives it: where leaving is possible, it is what gives staying its meaning, and where it is not, that is a fact about the conditions, not about the woman.

Third, the series puts the attempted assault directly before the proposal, and a viewer may fairly feel that the story uses a man’s violence to deliver Ji-ho to Se-hee’s door. This essay has declined to read it that way. The structure is the series’ own, and the objection stands.

Fourth, the women’s freedoms arrive with help. Su-ji launches her company with a devoted man cheering her on, and the work that brings Ji-ho back to writing comes from her husband’s first love. All three couples end as couples. A critic could say that the series lets its women write their own terms only inside romance, and that the clauses it celebrates are the ones a comfortable couple can afford.

Fifth, the families. The production’s statement of intent blamed house prices, and described a generation giving up on marriage, and even on relationships, because it had no secure place to live. The finale’s clauses settle the families and the house between two people, which is easier than settling the rent. And this essay may have a bias of its own. This Library has argued before that writing terms down is a good thing, and it may have found in this series what it went looking for.

Three things, none of them a rule.

The terms a marriage runs on are written by more than two people. A lender writes some, parents write some, a rite with an audience writes some, and a contract between two people does not keep them out. It is worth knowing, before the first holiday, who else is writing yours.

Fairness is not always a price. Sometimes the only fair answer to a day someone spent in your family’s kitchen is to spend the same hours in theirs. Payment can close a question that needed to stay open. Symmetry cannot be discharged without understanding.

And a contract is honest only while it describes you. When it stops, ending it is not a failure. A renewal is worth something where not renewing is possible, which is why the most important scene in a series about a contract marriage may be a handshake at a door.

So, once, to you. If you went along with any of it, the kitchen, the rite, an arrangement that suited your circumstances at the time, you were not weak and you were not naive. You were a person who needed somewhere to live, or somewhere to stand. Your terms were written when you had less choice than you have now. You are allowed to write them again.

This is a reading of a television series. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and nothing in it is advice about any marriage, contract or law. The survey figures are Statistics Korea’s, given with their year and definition; they describe opinions, not lives.

Who, besides the two of you, is writing the terms you live by? Which of them did you agree to, and which simply arrived?

Is there a clause in your life that you are still honouring after it stopped being true?

If you could renew it every year, would you? And could you, really, decide not to?

When someone gave hours to your family, how did you answer: with thanks, with money, or by standing where they stood?