Still talking about YouTube Afro-Korean dramas

I’d really like to thank everyone who has been reading this blog. Posts like this one I’m about to write are quite hard for me to write, and I imagine that they are even harder for people to read. And that is for the simple reason that (warning!) I don’t truly have any clear destination in my mind. It’s like there is something nebulous floating around in my subconscious that my conscious mind cannot grasp, and I wander around in circles trying to access it or reach it. It’s like there is an idea there, or a thought, or an impression, that is trying to take shape. From experience, I will eventually get there, but it sometimes takes a while for things to crystallise, or distill down from my subconscious mind to my conscious mind.
Sometimes it involves throwing lots of ideas out there in the course of writing the post.
So to make my own life a little easier, I am going to list here some of the ideas that occurred to me which are currently trying to form themselves into a coherent idea in my mind:

– Divorce rate of evangelical christians is over 50% – why?
– My previous post – that was also a rambling post where I was trying to work out what I was trying to say
– Calvinism, John MacArthur’s church – video I have just watched a few hours ago saying that his  church is collapsing
– Reflecting once again on Mr “not the will of God”. Wanting to finally let it go, and never refer to the incident again – but goodness, it is just too useful!

OK, now that I have got those ideas stated, let me state that I have had so many ideas recently that are not remotely nebulous, that are perfectly well formed!  But maybe that is the point though – if they are already clear, then I don’t have to spend time working them out. This blog is just as much about me working out ideas for my own benefit as sharing them, and part of me lazily thinks “well I’ve shared so much anyway!”

Well if all these ideas cannot be formed into one coherent post i can still systematically go through them.
Well let’s start with my previous post. That was also a rambling post where I myself did not understand the destination. To save people from reading through the whole post I eventually got to the point of stating that I had been watching lots of Afro-Korean romances on YouTube. I suspect that this is quite a new genre, but my goodness, it is huge! Well when I was writing the post, I did not truly understand two things:
1. Why I was actually writing the post, where I was going, the point I was trying to make
2. why I was actually watching so many of those videos.

Well it has now been over a month since writing the post and since them I have realised just why I have been watching so many of those videos:  this is a little sad, but I suspect that many people can relate: it has been a means of staving off loneliness (really!) Additionally, I made the point in my post that some of the videos were decidedly “spicy”, but “YouTube does not allow actual porn”. Well it turned out that I was speaking too soon (is that the correct idiom?!) because I have since found content that definitely crosses that line. I suspect that YouTube might have decided to embrace “Corn” content.  I’ve had to delete a few channels from my YouTube feed….
Anyway, a question that was at the back of my mind was why I was watching this spicy content (that does not actually stray into the realms of erotica, or pornography)?! Why am I watching it so avidly, why am I seeking it out? And the answer to this is that I have been subconsciously trying to understand things about sex which I suspect should be implicit, but are not – that is, how love, desire and attraction all interact. Additionally, I have also been beating myself up once again, yet again about “love”, what exactly it is. Part of the complication is that I believe that “love” is not truly a thing, that is, one single, coherent idea. Rather it is an umbrella term used to just shove a number of positive ideas into, which is why I find it confusing. And it is extremely subjective. Are other people as confused about this thing as I am?  Or am I just sitting here playing a semantics game all by myself?! Attraction is a thing. Desire is a thing. We all understand what people mean when they say “love”. But my question is, how does it actually work in practice?  Is there a way I can prescribe a recipe for myself?  Is “falling in love” truly a thing (I think not) or is it merely a case of falling into attraction?

Now here is the thing about watching made up videos to try to get an understanding of a real-life phenomenon: obviously these videos are completely made up. That means they come from people’s opinions, which means that they are unlikely to be accurate representations of reality. Furthermore, they are even made up by AI! And yet I have been watching these videos almost compulsively, in a bid to force my brain to “get it”!

So I don’t think that these videos can truly give me an accurate representation of reality, but they can tell me perhaps what people think about love, or they can give me a romanticised idea of love.

And this is the romanticised idea of love that these stories, and others like them perpetuate:  Without fail, these videos give the idea that love, that is, a reliable connection between two people on which both can build their lives, arises from attraction or desire.
I’ve got to make the point that these videos are not trying to be realistic, anymore than a fairytale is. They are deliberately created as works of fantasy, designed to be enjoyed as escapism.

You know what?  I don’t think that “love” is a consistent objective thing, the same way that desire and attraction are. On the other hand, I believe that “love” is a convenient shorthand for encapsulating a number of ideas that you feel towards your spouse or partner. These things include attraction, respect and care.  Saying “I love you” basically means: “I feel the necessary positive things about you that I need to feel to want to continue to be in an exclusive romantic relationship with you!”  “Falling in love” means “Coming to the place of thinking these positive things about you.”  I am going to spell out now the reason why I don’t believe in “falling in love”. Namely, character. This is all the more true if we take our love lessons from fiction or romance, as I have been doing! if we take our love lessons from fiction, or romance like Afro-Korean romances, these sources teach us that respect and care are essentially a part of attraction. It is almost like romance stories give the idea that there is something cosmic or magical about attraction, to ensure that we are only attracted to people who will be good for us. So someone need only confirm or adequate convince themselves that they are truly attracted to this person, and then they will start proposing, they will start moving in together, they will start building lives together.

This can work in fiction, as invariably the characters will turn out to have strong character. And yet in the real world, outside the domain of ridiculously attractive mafia bosses called Minjay or Minho or Ji-woon, and their corresponding, beautiful African or Black counterparts, almost invariably called “Amara” or “Zara Williams”, there is nothing cosmic about attraction. It is simply biological. It is not a sign from the heavens that this person is your spouse. After a month and a half (at least) of deep immersion into this Afro-Korean romance world, plus all the previous years I spent writing this blog, this is how I believe that “love” works in the real world:

Basically, when you are thinking of or working towards a relationship, there are certain things that should be necessary. Attraction is important, yes. However, we cannot let ourselves be deceived by online romances, or K-dramas, to give this a stronger position than it needs. We definitely should not let ourselves be deceived that attraction will magically lead to or create the necessary values for a marriage. A huge fallacy and one of my personal biggest bugbears about the general perception of relationships iswhen people say, or imply that “if he loved you”, he would treat you well. Well many men (and women too) have declared their loves in the most flowery terms, and then gone on to mistreat their spouses in the actual marriage. If by “love” you mean feelings, then the simple, sad fact is that feelings do not in any way dictate or control people’s behaviour. It is as if people think strong feelings of love can overcome previous poor character. My view is that if someone has been demonstrating poor character, then they are to be avoided, no matter how much “love” they might have for you (especially when, for instance, they are mafia bosses and literally kill people routinely as part of their job…)  I’m sure that in the overwhelming majority of abuse cases that we all read about or watch on our TV screens, the perpetrator would have told his wife or girlfriend, countless times, how much he loved her. And in many times he would actually have been sincere about feeling deep things for her. Feelings mean nothing. And obviously the perpetrator can also be a woman abusing her husband or boyfriend etc, or we could be talking about same-sex couples, where the rate of domestic violence is even higher than in hetero marriages.

This is the understanding that I am going to work with going forward. I am going to put the idea of love to the side, with all its complexities and confusions. Rather I am going to work with the idea that the interaction between me and a man needs to have a certain number of core things before we can move forward to consider a relationship. Another difference between the real world and romance stories is this: romance stories make it seem as if a relationship is inevitable, or morally imperative, if you “love” one another. In real life this is not true, but even if all the necessary factors are in place you can still choose to have a relationship, or not.

So then, off the top of my head, these are the necessary factors. Now please note that these are the necessary factors to initially consider working towards a relationship. Working towards a relationship will then involve working on those factors that have potential.

Attraction yes – but on evaluating myself, I realised that what truly lay behind my attraction to different men was a yearning for emotional intimacy.
*So I would replace “attraction” with  (for myself) “a potential for emotional intimacy”
.*I have already spoken at length on this blog about character. So of course consistently strong character is important and necessary
*Willingness to keep growing.
*Mutual respect.  For me, this seems to correlate with caring about someone. I personally find it hard to demonstrate compassion for people who I don’t respect, What I tend to do with such people that I don’t respect is that I discard them from my life.  Which is not to say that everyone I have unfriended has failed to win my respect. Sometimes friendships have felt too difficult or awkward even where I deeply respected and even cared deeply about the person.
*Compatibility in necessary core values, eg faith, that is, not just being a Christian but having the same emphases in faith as I do, approach to money and finances

I have previously written several lists on this blog of “essential criteria”, but off the top of my head I can’t remember whether these were lists of essential criteria for marriage, or whether the things listed were necessary components of character itself.

And then once we are actually in the relationship, we can work on the things that have potential For instance, we can work on actively developing emotional intimacy. We can also work on developing communication, and then after marriage we can finally introduce a physical sexual component to our marriage. I hate to get anyone in trouble, but I need to discreetly let you know that some of my gorgeous African sisters in Seoul have readily been giving it up to Minjay and Ji-woon long before an actual relationship, much less marriage. One of the most compelling stories I have watched started off with a very sexual holiday fling which was supposed to start and end there on holiday. But then, in that predictable twist of coincidence called “fate” so beloved by romances generally, they found themselves in the same workplace post-vacation. And then of course there was lots of tension caused by the previous closeness that they had shared and the unresolved feelings between them versus having to work closely together, and the cool professionalism that they tried to display to one another before they of course, invariably, eventually found their way back to one another. And in that particular story there was also a huge, gasp-worthy twist introduced that he was engaged (to someone of similar billionaire status to himself, so naturally it was not truly a happy engagement, by going ahead to marry his initial fiancée he would not have been “true to himself”, you know how these things are!)  And he had been engaged to Ms Fellow Billionaire all along, even while he was happily getting amorous on holiday. I have to say that I found the story quite compelling, and the tension between them was written so well, even though it was likely AI. (By the way, everyone or at least 75% of people, I’d say, know that these stories are AI, and like me, no-one cares, but still offer critique as if they are real stories written by real people!) However, I believe that this story would have worked just as well if they had merely been close, and not necessarily sexual, on holiday beforehand, although perhaps the twist of his being engaged all along would not have been so hardhitting.

I must admit that all these stories made me sit down and critically examine my thoughts about sex and why as Christians we insist that sex needs to come after marriage, and not before. In romance sex tends to be portrayed as part of exploring feelings, or establishing compatibility. In our faith though, sex is a physical expression of the covenant of marriage. So it is not part of the exploration. It is supposed to be exclusive, love and marriage are supposed to be intentional. Yes, there is an element of exploring, in trying to work out whether this person would be a good match for you, but a physical expression of sex is not to be part of that, but is to be reserved for sealing the covenant, as it were. In fiction people can do what they like, and it all tends to work out in the end. In the real world, we need to worry about things such as pregnancy and STDs (speaking of which, I was stunned at the headline that Bill Gates gave his ex-wife Melinda STDs…Bill Gates you say?!  The Bill Gates?!)

There was another story I also watched, which also very compelling but I eventually abandoned it halfway through the second video as it was a 2 video series. And in that story, the beautiful, talented and hardworking African lady was drugged by a jealous coworker so “she accidentally slept with her boss”. Once again there was huge tension between her and her boss after they unexpectedly woke up in the same bed (as you would imagine!) which again was written very compellingly. In this second story, it dragged on a bit though which is why I eventually discarded it. However, my confusion, and the reason I bring this up here, was that it was not made clear whether she and her boss merely woke up together in the same bed, or whether they actually – you know. On waking up, he seemed to be just as confused to see her in his bed as she was to be there. Was he also drugged? Or perhaps he was merely very drunk! In the real world, that would be the primary consideration, wouldn’t it?! That is, “Did we actually?!!!” You’d be talking pregnancy tests, STD tests, everything. And they would also be trying to get to the bottom of how they ended up in the same bed, the drugging incident would be explored. In the story, the “jealous coworker” who drugged her was not even mentioned, beyond that literal first sentence. There was no backstory created to explain the jealousy, or an explanation of the mechanism of being drugged. The drugging and jealous coworker were literally just a plot device, taking up a tiny part of the real estate of the story, but explaining a huge part of the plot. All the practical considerations that come with sex were just glossed over. In fiction you don’t need to care about real world practicalities. And in that particular story, the tension and the newly heightened awareness of one another would still have been exactly the same if they’d merely woken up, fully clothed in the same bed, or even in the same room. Even the drugging/drunk boss plot would still have worked. Additionally in these stories these characters who are gripped by such strong passion almost invariably get together and eventually get married, and live “happily ever after”. In the real world, that does not happen so readily, does it? What tends to happen in the real world is that you will explore with one person, then for whatever reason it will fall through, then you will explore with person 2, person 3 and by the time you do eventually get married you will likely have a succession of people that you will have explored with, and potentially given your body to. All of these sexual experiences will then erode the sexual exclusivity of your marriage.

Over the course of this last week or so I found myself getting into a minor online argument with a few people. Someone had said that body count, that is, the number of pre-marital sexual partners someone has, “literally did not matter”. And I replied that I thought it did matter, because high body count indicates an unwillingness or inability to commit for the longterm. And then someone else had disagreed with me, stating their personal experience that many people with high body counts did enjoy happy marriages. And then, I did what I always do.  I reached out with my metaphorical big stick and metaphorically thwacked that second person over the head with my argument, so conclusively that there was no coming back. I looked for statistics, and apparently there are established statistics, that people or rather women (predictably sexist research so it focused on women) with high body counts are overwhelmingly more likely to be unhappy in marriage, and to subsequently get divorced, than women with low or zero body counts. This is apparently true even when every other factor is adjusted for. And this is overwhelmingly true. And then I felt a little guilty about shutting down this person’s argument so thoroughly, so I tried to mollify it a little. But the truth is, statistically the disparity is overwhelming. I’ve been advocating against premarital sex for years, but I myself was shocked at the disparity. To be honest it is only because this person argued with me that I bothered to look for statistics. This is not to say that a woman with a high body count is automatically condemned to having an unhappy marriage of course, but it clearly does not help.
If you want to duplicate these results, go ahead and google as I did “correlation between body count and marital success”.

So to conclude, I think I have found the understanding that I have been compulsively looking for regarding these AfroKorean dramas.  I’m still likely going to watch them for the sake of staving off loneliness.  to be honest though, I would much prefer to be speaking to an actual person, and I would eagerly throw all the Minjays, Minhos, Ji-woons, Taemins and all their brothers to the online darkness in favour of having  deep conversations with a real person. (And yet all of this reminds me that I have deep emotional needs,  So who knows? Perhaps at one point Mr eventual Huggie-Wuggie would get fed up of constantly needing to cater to my emotional needs and tell me to go and watch a K-Drama!)
Now I believe I understand what I need to look for.  I can forget about this thorny question of love. I can rather go around with this currently short mental checklist (I have to compare with my existing lists and collate entries from those though!) Now the next question is this: If I eventually find someone who ticks off all my criteria, how do I advertise my openness to the idea of a relationship, if he’s the kind of person who believes in falling in love?!  I mean, how do I tell him “I don’t personally believe in falling in love but I think that you represent a good potential spouse and I would like to explore the possibility of a relationship with you”? This would be awkward and difficult even if women were allowed to “make the first move”. How much more awkward and difficult would this be when women are supposed to allow men to make the first move?!  Additionally, I am now in my forties. Can we dispense with this idea of who is or is not supposed to make the first move?!  To be clear, I’ve never paid the slightest attention to it anyway!  Or I have, but I have still found myself making the first move (and cough – even chasing) no fewer than four times! But I do have a strong excuse – that is, utterly rock solid. All the same, because this will now be my husband, I want to do things properly. I am also conscious that my husband might be a little irked off if I were to seemingly usurp his authority this way, no matter how strong my excuse might be…

To be honest, I have all manner of radical ideas about love besides this. Do I need to find a way of getting a man on board with my radical ideas?  Firstly sharing them with him, and then finding out whether he agrees etc…