Do you have a lover now? We usually feel a strange atmosphere before dating. This condition is called ‘SOME(썸)’ in Korean. In this atmosphere, we play hard to get (push-pull relationships) to each other, interpret each other's actions, and think about whether it is a green light (a signal that expresses that the other person has good feelings for them). So what is SOME?
The Korean word SOME originated from ‘something’ in English. It means that something is going on between two people but they are both not sure what. That is, two people have a little romance but haven’t said it in words. In English-speaking countries, expressions such as ‘seeing someone’ or ‘have feelings for’ are used as idioms, but recently the new word ‘flirtationship’ has been coined. It is a combination of ‘flirting' that reveals that you have a good interest in the other person and ‘friendship’.
Meanwhile, the use of the word SOME has increased as the spread of smartphones is activated. With the increasingly widespread use of smartphones in the 2010s, mobile messengers such as KakaoTalk and Direct Messages(DM) also began to develop. As a result, the use of the word SOME has increased dramatically. According to Professor Yang Dong-ok of Keimyung University, the relationship between men and women who do not date but keep in touch with each other has become more common as it is easier to share their daily lives through mobile messengers.
According to a Korean newspaper, SOME appears to be a prelude to the lovers’ relationship, exploring whether it is worth spending time and money to meet. The aspects changing from a prelude to real hearted relationship vary in different cultures. In the case of Western countries, it is natural to develop from flirtation stage to lover stage without making a direct speech such as “Would you be my boyfriend/girlfriend?”. But in Korea, it is common for a relationship to be confirmed after a verbal act (confession) such as “Would you be my boyfriend/girlfriend?”.
Therefore, no matter how smooth the emotional exchange took place, it can still be SOME, and even if it has been less than an hour since they met, it can be a ‘lover relationship’.
According to Choi Myung-ho, a professor at Seoul National University, there are two types of SOME: exploratory some and pleasure some. In order to know the difference between the two, you must first understand the word ‘willful uncertainty’. Willful uncertainty is a state in which you do not know what you really want, or you do know what you really want but don’t make up your mind. Based on this, exploratory type is an act to resolve this willful uncertainty. It is to ‘explore’ the other person whether it is okay to develop a deeper relationship. On the other hand, pleasure type is an act of enjoying pleasure that comes from an ambiguous relationship with the other person. The exploratory type people and the pleasure type people also differ in why they end their SOME. This is because they have different ultimate purposes. In the case of the exploratory type, they will end some because they acknowledge the favorability or realize that it was a simple curiosity, without love. On the other hand, in the case of the pleasure type, they will end some because they judge that they are no longer able to get pleasure because they lost interest.
In this respect, it seems that people in a SOME relationship have to pay a lot of attention to their feelings. Nevertheless, statistics from the Hankook ilbo show that Koreans in their 20s and 30s prefer flirting to dating. There were many reasons for emotion. First, there was that people hated the emotional exhaustion that people had to experience when I started dating, secondly, it was too much to try to maintain the relationship, and lastly, people didn't like the feeling of being bound by the other person. But there are reasons related to the socio-economic situation. A typical example is that they feel that their life is unstable due to socio-economic problems such as low social status, unemployment, economic dependence and so on. As can be seen from new words such as ‘sampo generations (the generation that gave up dating, marriage, and childbirth)’ and ‘ohpo generations (the generation that gave up house, career, dating, marriage, and childbirth)’, many young people have become more inclined to regard love as a lower value due to their jobs and economical problems. That is, the younger generation in Korea recognizes that dating is a luxury because their future is uncertain.
Yang Yoon, a psychology Professor at Ewha Womans University, said “As the analog age has shifted to the digital age, the relationship with people has been lightened. In the analog age, people tend to take their relationships seriously through face-to-face meetings. However, these days, young people tend to take their relationships lightly because now is the world where they can keep in touch through mobile, without meeting, so it is easy to disconnect the relationship at any time.”
Professor Jang Jae-sook of Dongguk University explains the preference of the 2030 generation for Some as a social phenomenon that reflects the psychology of modern people who want to be less hurt than take responsibility for the consequences of love. He added that growing interest in social crimes, such as dating violence between lovers, could also contribute to young people's awareness of the dangers of love. As such, SOME can be seen as a subjective and strategic choice of people who are constantly shaking between giving up love and romantic relationships.
With this growing preference for SOME, the cultural industry related to SOME is also increasing. One of the most popular TV programs is ‘Heart Signal’. Heart Signal is a variety show distributed by Channel A, showing eight ordinary people, 4 men and 4 women living together for 30 days in a house called ‘Signal House’. They get to know each other in the house, dating, eating, playing together. The casts are basically non-entertainers, with different jobs and different lifestyles. They go to work, meet people freely, date outside, and get to know each other naturally. With no fantasy, people watching the show get more interested with their delicate emotions, feeling a sense of reality, sympathizing with the casts. Producer Park Chul-hwan of Heart Signal explained that the reason for the success of the show is that viewers have gained sympathy and comfort by projecting themselves on the appearance of the cast on TV.
Source: https://isplus.com/article/view/isp202308020021
In addition, there is a song about SOME. A representative example is Soyou and Junggigo's ‘Some’ which was released in 2014. In the lyrics, there are many parts which reveal the characteristics of flirting, but best of them is “It feels like you’re mine, it seems like you’re mine but not / It feels like I’m yours, it seems like I’m yours but not / What are we?”.
Local governments have also started running programs to support love between men and women. A typical example is a matching event called ‘Solomon's Choice’ hosted by Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do. The name of the program has a double meaning, which can remind you of both ‘solo’, which means a single person in Korea, and Solomon, a religious figure who makes a wise choice. The event’s title was intended to be a humorous play on words, using the word ‘solo’.1200 people applied for this matching program, and 39 couples were finally matched after the stage of SOME. As to this program, Seongnam Mayor Shin Sang-jin said that he was told many times, from grateful parents of participants, that ‘Solomon’s Choice’ was an indispensable event. He also said he was assured of the matching program’s importance after seeing nearly 1200 applicants.
SOME tends to be the opposite of ‘relation continuity’, which is a fundamental attribute of love. That's why some people are concerned that the act of flirting takes relationships lightly. On the contrary, others point out that flirting is the step of being more cautious because people want to take relationships more seriously. This is because we don't want to play with the other person's heart, and we also see it as one of the protective mechanisms so we don't want to hurt or feel hurt in human relationships.
Robert C. Solomon, Professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, said that love is a shared self-identity, a desperate effort for each of us to find our other half, and an experience that redefines our self through others. In other words, human-to-human relationships are a complex process of sharing each other's selves and, in conclusion, discovering new aspects of themselves beyond the mere expansion of social networking.
Now let's look around. There are so many people around us, including family, friends, and co-workers. What kind of attitude should we have in a society where we can't help but talk to countless people every day and communicate with them?
(Interview reference: Hankookilbo, 2014)