Breaking Down Toxicity In Love Featuring Marriage and Divorce Pt. 1

Starting off with possibly the most unstable character on the show, Kim Dong Mi, who is married to the wealthy Shin Ki Rim, father to one of the cheating husbands Shin Yoo Shin. Savvy? Now, Kim Dong Mi has raised Shin Yoo Shin as a loving stepmother since he was a young child and the two have developed what could be argued as an inappropriate relationship at times. The term I would prefer to use here is grooming. However, the mother-son relationship is not yet sexual although Kim Dong Mi sure dreams for it to happen.

In terms of her relationship with her husband who is considerably older than her, Kim Dong Mi is a loving wife and caregiver (or at least she pretends to be). Under the guise of a loving wife, she is actually slowly poisoning her husband and plotting ways to get rid of Shin Yoo Shin’s wife despite sharing a daughter together. The fixation and attraction on her stepson, that she has raised from childhood, is quite disturbing to say the least, but not as disturbing as the fact that she is determined to succeed.

In addition to grooming her stepchild and murdering her husband through poisoning (not to mention elderly abuse), Kim Dong Mi decides to move in with her step-son and daughter-in-law. Now in close proximity to the object of her affection, she also gains close access to Yoo Shin’s wife Sa Pi Young who she begins to drug in order to spend more time with him. Personally, with each episode, I pray she gets caught and ends up in prison for her crimes but my experience with the writer tells me it won’t happen for some time.

Love featuring Marriage and Divorce takes an interesting spin on domestic physical abuse by making the woman the abuser. “According to South Korea’s national survey in 2010, intimate-partner abuse — encompassing emotional, physical and sexual forms — occurred in 53.8% of married couples, and in 81.9% of those cases, it was wives being abused by husbands” (Times, 2017).

The republic of Korea’s  “Special Act for the Punishment of Domestic Violence defines domestic violence crimes as acts of assault, injury, abandonment, abuse, arrest, confinement, intimidation and so on between family members which inflict physical, mental, or property damage” (WHO, 2009).