Loving Korean

Are Korean men like what we see in Korean drama? Does an average Korean guy behave like characters do in Kdrama? This is the latest question we answer.

Linda asked:

I happen to like Korean drama, but not like a fanatic fans who hunts everything about k-drama, but I am able to do a marathon in watching k series ^^

Ok, to make it brief, since i’s enjoying k drama very much, I found that there are these typical manly things about K Drama male main character. They tend to be a proud person, dominant, protective, etc (but in a good way i think). Now, at first i think it’s just a mean of building a protagonist character, but after many k dramas, i started to wonder if that is actually a picture of average korean men.

I know there are many character of people no matter what their nationality is, but do korean man are somewhat like those general character in kdrama?

I’m Indonesian by the way. Trying to learn korean too, so i won’t have to rely on subtitles so much :D

Annyong!

This was a really difficult answer for us to give. Partly because Linda is right that people have vastly different personalities despite sharing the same nationality, but mainly because neither Kimchi Man nor I really watch Korean dramas.

In the three years since I met him I’ve only watched two: Coffee Prince (Korean: 커피프린스 1호점) and The Slave Hunters (Korean: 추노), and before I met him I didn’t even know they existed. We do watch a lot of Korean movies together, though. Some of them do have similar plots and character development to the dramas, but all in all, we didn’t feel equipped to give the answer.

That’s why we turned to our kind readers, asking them what they thought was a typical Korean guy as depicted by Korean dramas. We got many great answers! Sadly, we couldn’t include them all but here are some:

Typical Kdrama guy according to our readers

• strawberriimilkk: Doing anything for that special girl and working hard to make sure she’s happy. I would love to meet a guy like that one day <3
• quickdrykoala: I like it when they seem sorta mean at first, but they have a secret soft spot that is just too adorable! XD
• somethingfruity-cutie: Being stubborn! But also really smart and nice ^_^ But stubbornness makes them funny.
• love2june: If a guy likes a girl he can do anything for her and it doesn’t even matter if that girl doesn’t like him or likes another guy :D
• nutingz: I’ve seen a lot of k dramas and the guys are either kind and generous, sweet and humble. Or rude, obnoxious and mean but inside they are a lot more humble and don’t like to show their feelings.
• dreamingofkorea: Holds your bag, holds your hand, grabs your wrist when you’re leaving in anger. Grabs your neck for a kiss, piggy back rides, stubborn
• the-weenie-hut-general Flower Boy dramas: It’s where there’s a group of extremely good-looking guys (usually in high school) among other guys (who are just as attractive but are considered ugly compared to the Flower Boys). The main character is usually a poor girl, while the Flower Boys are rich and spoiled. The lead guy is usually a snobbish asshole who treats the girl like crap in the beginning but when she speaks out against him and acts like a psycho towards him, he changes his feelings towards her while the other lead guy is trying to win her over. Then she ends up going with the guy who treated her like crap in the beginning. There are usually four guys in the group; the other two are usually just background guys for comic relief.
• Marlo Ito I’d have to say the “common” traits aren’t very positive that I have noticed. Lots of dominance and pulling girls around. I would think the positive aspect would be that when they guys finally fall for the girl they become like crazy LOYAL. But even to the extent that it is shown in dramas isn’t very positive…but why can’t I stop watching them!?!?!?! So conflicted. and someones always gettin cancer…
• My Korean Husband In so many dramas the guy starts out being a jerk and is really rude to the girl. Of course he is rich and handsome and usually thinks the girl is below him. Something changes and he will start liking her. There is usually a lot of wrist grabbing and he is usually more dominant than the girl. And when he kisses her she just stands there with her eyes open like she doesn’t know what a kiss is haha.
• Georgia McCarthy protective♥ and he will put the girl before him♡
• Lysa Zehra Hussain When he grabs her hand when she was about to walk away and give her a kiss ^^

Do you agree with their ideas of a typical guy in a Korean drama?

We even had one real Korean guy chime in:

• David Parker Kim Unrealistic part? All Korean guys ain’t a son of business tycoon. We ain’t kinda walking ATM. Mother in law ain’t b****. Heroine with pure heart is always in deep s*** but all of sudden handsome and wealthy prince comes up to her as a savior. if guys fall in love, they want to do everything for her. right? but women here only want to get their perfect love with MONEY and the RISE of STATUS which they think is worth loving no matter how much they pretend not to be like that. This might be one of the reason korean guys also want to get married to foreign girls who might be able to put LOVE over MONEY. I didn’t mean money is not important in love. I mean it in terms of priority. when it come to Korea, what really matters is Money not just pure love

Kimchi Man knows a lot more Korean guys than I do and he said most guys are not on the romantic level of the dramas. But he also thinks that some guys do get influenced by them and use them as a blueprint of the type of perfect guy they want to be.

But probably the best and the most valuable answer we can give is to take the most typical traits that you described in your comments, and tell you if Kimchi Man is like that or not.

Does my Korean guy act like in Korean drama

Stubbornness: Oh yes, he is stubborn. Until I met him I was always considered the most stubborn of the group. Now, I’ve finally met my match. But I’m not a Korean guy (last I checked), so it would be unfair to say that Kimchi Man’s stubbornness is due to his nationality or gender.

Doing anything for that special girl and working hard to make sure she’s happy. Again, a big yes here. I’ve dated Europeans before and I was always frustrated because I had the impression that I was working much harder to make them happy than they were to do the same for me (in European guys’ defense, I did date only 0.0000004059 % of population of Europe so it’s not really a representative sample ^^). Their behavior made me feel unappreciated.

With my Korean boyfriend, this can never happen. I tried to make it clear that I don’t require any gifts from him, but even when he doesn’t have enough money to buy stuff he needs, I still receive big packages from him. And the most wonderful thing is that they always contain something very thoughtful, which usually I just mentioned in the passing ages ago. Even I forget about it, but he never does!

The first package I received from him, which was before we’ve ever met, had so many meaningful items. It was unusual but incredibly romantic for me that someone who was so far away and from completely different culture knew me so well. I think he’s really good at showing me two very important things in the relationships: that I’m more important to him than money, and that he listens and cares about what I say. (But still, when you are reading this Kimchi Man, buy stuff you need first!) I enjoy being able to go all out in making him happy and never having for a second to worry I am being taken advantage of.

Treating girl bad in the beginning but changing afterwards. Definitely not. He was always sweet and polite, from the moment he sent me the first message.

Rich and handsome Well, he’s very handsome :)

Wrist grabbing Thankfully no. Wrist grabbing sounds rather aggressive and disrespectful to me. If I want to leave I get to leave.

This can be generalized to other things in our relationship as well. If I get angry and say I don’t want to talk to him, he respects that and doesn’t make any effort to talk to me anymore. It feels like if I didn’t make the first move he would remain forever silent. I do sometimes wish he would let the romance take over him and come after me, but when I see the alternative, I am glad he is the way he is.

Protective I’m actually not sure about this one. I think our situation makes it impossible to tell. We are always in my country, where he doesn’t understand the language, doesn’t know the way, and looks different than anyone else. I am on my home turf and that makes me want to protect him and provide some kind of buffer between him and the rest of the country.

We traveled outside of my country only once. I got very sick almost as soon as we arrived and he went out into the middle of the night to find a pharmacy even though he didn’t speak the language or ever been to that country before. He made it seem like it was a really easy thing to do, but I know he was just pretending to make me feel better. So if I would have to guess, I would say that yes, he is protective.

Dominant Not at all. He’s very shy and timid. That’s not to say that he’s not capable or self-sufficient, which I admire a lot, but he’s not dominant in any way, not physically and not when we’re choosing which tv series to watch, hehe.

Piggy back rides You see, I really don’t like being carried. I’m always worried for the person who’s trying to carry me, plus I am anxious that they will drop me so I prefer to stand firmly with both feet on the ground. Also, I am 3 inches taller than Kimchi Man, so we always joke that if he tried to carry me my feet would just drag along on the ground.

But once when his friend visited my country, I was recovering from surgery, and would get tired easily. Every time I would start lagging behind his friend seemed genuinely annoyed that Kimchi Man didn’t offer to carry me, and was admonishing him what a crappy boyfriend he is being. I actually quite enjoyed this little bickering of theirs. Of course, when Kimchi Man would offer, I declined every time. However, one time I was being in a teasing mood so I suggested that Kimchi Man actually isn’t strong enough to carry me. I knew it was not true since he lifts twice my weight in the gym, but I couldn’t help myself but tease him a bit. My punishment for teasing him was that I had to let him carry me cause of course he had to prove that he can ^^

Romantic Well, this really depends how you define romantic. I think he is, but I believe some (most?) girls would disagree. You see, we don’t celebrate Valentine’s day, nor any of the Korean romantic holidays like White day, Pepero day…. I was trying to get him into celebrating Pepero day, but he wasn’t interested and honestly only reason I did that was because I really like eating Pepero (ok, ok, there was another reason that something happened for the first time in our relationship on that day but that would be TMI ;) ).

But he wrote letters that brought tears to my eyes, he stood by me in impossible situations, he wrote a love message in the snow in Korea when we had to be apart, and he gave me his dog tags which I know meant more to him than any other possession. All of those little gestures in my eyes make him the most romantic man alive.

So there it is. Kimchi Man is only one Korean man, but we hope now you can better judge for yourself if Korean guys are anything like how they are portrayed in Korean dramas.