The webtoon Love Sex Relationship is, like the title, about the relationship between a couple, and between love and sex as well. As there’s the saying, ‘there’s no friendship between a man and a woman’, the relationship in the title is that between lovers.  

This work shed the light to two women, Jiwon and Hanna, each suffering different kinds of deficiency. Each of them has the thing the other doesn’t have, and lacks the thing the other has.

 

Jiwon is sharing true love with a thoughtful 5-year long boyfriend. Even from a viewpoint of a man who doesn’t know love relationship much, Jiwon’s boyfriend is quite a nice dude. Though they may be not passionate like they were in their early relationship, with stable feeling of a mature relationship, they are still caring for each other. Even if they may not feel that way, I’m sure anyone looking at them will think that way.

But Jiwon and her boyfriend have a certain deficiency. Maybe it’s Jiwon feeling that way particularly. Gently put, it’s the lack of enjoyable sex life. Their frequency of making love becomes visibly scarce, and her boyfriend doesn’t take care of her well for he’s busy for his work (like typical middle-aged men in Korea).

Jiwon, seemingly not grown up in an old-fashioned family, is oddly not open to sexuality and does not say about it. For the reasons, she doesn’t tell her boyfriend that she’s sexually frustrated. So, she gets upset when she sees her boyfriend watching a porn, and says how can you turn up on other women, which would be a ridiculous episode for any man whether he has a girlfriend or not. It means Jiwon has a big problem in her mind.

Hanna is the exact opposite of Jiwon. She, formerly a below-average as a woman, transforms into a sleek beauty by investing (?) a vast amount of money. (Of course, I’m not against it even a bit.) Men stand in line to get laid with her, and she doesn’t only enjoy her sex life, but also write the experience to earn big fame. Now she’s an indeed successful woman with a nice title of ‘sex columnist’ with a fantastic face and body, earning much money, and enjoying fame enough to make passers-by recognize her in the street.

 

 But because of the pain common to people who have below-average looks, and mental trauma caused by the pain, she doesn’t get love of emotional exchange like Jiwon does. She says in front of others ‘the mind is only an illusion we can’t see and the body is the most honest’, but a human is a social animal and the existence feels happiness by human exchanges.

Jiwon and Hanna were close friend in their school days, but got out of touch naturally as they went to college, and they come to meet each other by chance when they face their own problems. The odd relationship between them that each of them has the thing the other doesn’t have and lacks the thing the other has, advances in good way as both of them are not evil deep down.

Only by the simple introduction, you may see it as a plain story. It could be an obvious issue so easy to find. But drawing fun from such obvious issue has never been easy. It’s difficult to maintain emotional intensity between hampering the theme and apathy of readers and to regulate tempo not to be boring. The webtoon Love Sex Relationship is an excellent work, more suited to the expression ‘good to be empathized by anyone’ more than to ‘obvious’.