SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Because This is My First Life
(이번 생은 처음이라 / Ibeon Saeng-eun Cheo-eumira)
MyDramaList rating: 8.0/10

Okay so unlike what I predicted in my last review, this wasn’t 12 episodes but 16 and I don’t think I took longer to finish it than the previous two, but it felt like this took me much longer. Not in a bad way, just because I savored. every. single. episode. and I didn’t want it to end too quickly.

It’s been on my list mostly because I saw Lee Min Ki would be in it and I really like him. Also the female lead is very good and I hadn’t seen anything of them in a while.
I went into it completely unaware that it was based on the Japanese drama NigeHaji (Nigeru no ha Haji da ga Yaku ni Tatsu) which I saw about 2 years ago. I didn’t know this was the Korean remake. I just started watching and after a while I thought ‘hey this kinda reminds me of NigeHaji’ and then I checked on DramaWiki and it actually said ‘Related shows: NigeHaji’ so yep that’s when I found out.

I have to say that even though it’s probably based on NigeHaji, the Korean version goes way deeper into a lot of topics. NigeHaji is unique because of the way it’s filmed, sometimes it’s like a documentary following the female lead and it takes them way longer to actually get to the real falling-in-love romance part. It takes them longer to admit they’re starting to really fall for each other and the main story is just about their life together.
The Korean version not only introduces a bunch of important side characters with their own romance stories, but it also deals with a lot of critical topics. I was surprised to see how much sexual jokes and innuendos were made, since Korean dramas (as Japanese dramas) tend to hold back on such things a lot and keep it all innocent and pure most of the time. Besides the sexually-related topics, it also dealt very critically with the mistreatment and (sexual) harassment of women on the work floor and in society.
I think this was very bold and I wonder how this was received in Korea by the viewers.

So, for those of you who also haven’t seen NigeHaji, I will give a summary of the story. Of the Korean remake of course, since this review is about this one. But I won’t be able to help making some references and comparisons with the Japanese version so forgive me for that.
Because This is My First Life is about a woman named Yoon Ji Ho (played by Jung So Min), whose dream it always has been to become a writer. However, at the age of 30, she has been an assistant writer for dramas for 5 years and still hasn’t really found her place. She can’t take pride in her work that much and to make matters worse, she is kicked out of her parents’ house because her younger brother knocked up a girl and they get all the prior attention in her family as they are very patriarchal. Ji Ho needs to find her own place, as she won’t be able to live with her brother anymore now that he has to take care of his young pregnant wife.
On the other side, there is the male protagonist, Nam Se Hee (played by Lee Min Ki). He is a application designer at a company that has recently released a new dating application. He is a very stoic person, almost robotic, who handles everything through formulas and doesn’t seem to have any emotional feelings. He only cares about his house and his cat. He is looking for a housemate because his rent is getting alarmingly high for the money he’s earning, but so far he has kicked out all housemates because they couldn’t match his lifestyle.
Through a coincidental course of events, Ji Ho learns about this person looking for a housemate through one of her high school friends. Hearing the name Se Hee, she assumes it’s a woman (since it’s usually a girl’s name apparently and her female writer boss is also called Se Hee) and enthusiastically responds. Se Hee is informed of a certain Ji Ho who is interested in being his housemate and he thinks it’s a guy (since Ji Ho is usually a guy’s name apparently and he knew someone in the army who was also called Ji Ho). So first they start living in the same house without meeting each other. Because Se Hee always leaves early in the morning and returns only late in the evening and in-between Ji Ho only comes out in the hours between that and is already asleep when he comes back. And they’re so polite as not to check in on each other while they’re sleeping.
When they are coincidentally having their respective company dinner/celebration in the same restaurant, Ji Ho finds out that the director she’s been having a crush on for 3 years is seeing someone. Just before that, she has briefly met Se Hee (of course not knowing who he is). When she’s waiting for the bus home and Se Hee sits next to her and starts talking randomly about a cat’s neocortex, Ji Ho feels strangely comforted. In a moment of thinking ‘Why are people only expected to kiss when they’re dating/screw it, if I’m never going to date I might as well just kiss someone’, she kisses Se Hee, comforted by the thought that he’s a stranger and she’ll never see him again anyway.
Of course, they meet in the elevator at home the next day.
Even though it’s awkward at first, Se Hee finds that Ji Ho matches his lifestyle very well. She has the habit of cleaning the house thoroughly when she starts writing and takes out the trash and feeds the cat. Unlike his previous experiences, Se Hee is very satisfied with her. Also, because Ji Ho needs a place to stay and she’s able to contribute to the rent with her income, it’s a win-win situation for both of them.
Then a nasty situation arises at Ji Ho’s work. In a drunken state, her ex-crush director nearly sexually assaults her and refuses to take responsibility. Even her female boss at work is trying to smooth everything out with a dinner. Ji Ho, however, feels terribly wronged, her co-workers only give her the feeling that she’s overreacting and she quits her job. Now, of course, she has no more income.
But because their conditions and values matched so well, they establish a contract and decide to get married for these reasons. Se Hee needs the rent and the household help, and Ji Ho needs the house.

So this intro of how they get to live together is already very different from NigeHaji. In NigeHaji, the female lead is hired as a cleaner at the male lead’s place because he’s out so often, and he is so satisfied with her work that he doesn’t mind her staying, especially since she enjoys this job and needs a place to stay. They get married because it’s convenient for both of them and they won’t have to explain why they’re living together while they’re not actually together.
However, of course, in both cases as they continue living together they eventually do fall in love with each other. In the Korean version, they just added a lot more story lines. Besides the main leads’ friends (about which I’ll write more later), they included more family content of both Ji Ho’s and Se Hee’s families, and they added a sad background story for Se Hee to explain why he was against marriage so much initially.
In the Japanese version, I don’t remember there being so many side stories and background stories, and I thought it was legit because there’s a lot of Japanese guys these days who don’t get married because they’re either too introvert or too consumed by working. The female lead was also very easy-going, until of course she started to wish for more and couldn’t really get it.

Before I go on, I wish to introduce the important side characters in the series.
Yang Ho Rang (played by Kim Ga Eun) is one of Ji Ho’s best friends. They’ve known each other since middle school. She’s the friend with all the drama and emotional outbursts. She has been dating the same guy for seven years and they fight a lot but always end up back together. They love each other a lot, but sometimes Ho Rang’s unpredictable emotions put a strain on him too. She often gets upset about the tiniest things and he’s not very good at reading what she’s getting at most of the time. She has this idealistic idea of getting married and moving in together and tries to make this clear to her boyfriend, but when he doesn’t get it -she also has her age to worry about- she becomes anxious.
Her boyfriend Shim Won Seok (played by Kim Min Seok) loves Ho Rang very much, but he’s in a pinch at work. He’s also trying to develop an app, but he can’t seem to get investments. That’s why he doesn’t have the confidence that he’s going to be able to make Ho Rang happy even if he marries her and that’s why he keeps stalling.
Woo Soo Ji (played by Esom) is Ji Ho’s other best friend, also from middle school. Ji Ho, Ho Rang and Soo Ji are like the three musketeers. Soo Ji is very tall and skinny, and she works at an investment company. Even though she’s the only one of the three with an actual full-time job, she’s continually being sexually harassed by her co-workers at company dinners and just throughout the day. Not physically, but verbally. Little stinging remarks, she overhears people talking about her boobs, her boss keeps asking her inappropriate questions… I honestly found it quite hard to watch.
Ma Sang Goo (played by Park Byung Eun) is Se Hee’s boss, and he also has a good relation with Soo Ji’s boss. However, as he’s drawn to Soo Ji and finds out how she’s being treated, he tries to help her.
Ho Rang and Soo Ji are two completely different people. While Ho Rang’s life goal is to get married and be a housewife, Soo Ji is the kind of modern woman who doesn’t need marriage, and feels the need to be free. Her middle school dream was to become the CEO of her own company, but instead she has to keep smiling and nodding while she’s being made fun of right where she stands. She keeps her frustrations to herself because she needs the job – her mother is handicapped and she’s saving up for an apartment where she can live with her mother. The reason why she only flirts around and sleeps with guys without beginning a relationship is also because she’ll feel guilty if she goes off with someone and has to leave her mother behind with her bad legs.
I think all the different relationships in the series give a very good impression of how different the concept of marriage is for everyone. Are marriage and love necessarily connected? Why do people get married? It places a lot of question marks by these normative standards.
Marriage isn’t just a happy thing, it comes with a lot of responsibility, not only towards society but towards a lot of involved people as well. Even though you should marry only one person, you get this whole package of other people with it whether you like it or not.

Even though Ji Ho and Se Hee start off their ‘married life’ with the knowledge that this marriage is not love-based, Ji Ho quite soon finds herself getting involved in Se Hee’s personal life. She’s taken aback by his use of the word ‘us/our’ (uri 우리) and gets flustered because of that. She comes up with the idea of naming his cat ‘Woo Ri’ after this word and even visits him at work. However, Se Hee pushes her back because he says he feels uncomfortable with her doing that. For him, the contract is still what binds them together and he’s not ready to see past it yet. Slightly indignant, Ji Ho takes some distance from him too, until they both realize there really is something that’s keeping them together.

Here arises another part from the Korean remake that was not in the Japanese one, and I feel this was only used as a plot tool to make Ji Ho and Se Hee go back to each other. Ji Ho meets a guy at her part-time job, Bok Nam (played by Kim Min Gyu), who immediately shows interest in her.
Meanwhile at Se Hee’s company, a guy with the same name and his pictures is registered to their dating application and receives a lot of complaints because of reported stalking.
So, of course, Se Hee thinks that this guy is after Ji Ho now. In the end it turns out that Bok Nam was actually the victim of phishing and he didn’t really have any evil intentions. But they only find that out after Se Hee kicks his over-prized motorcycle to the ground in a fit of distress because he thought he was going to assault Ji Ho.
One thing I did feel was very weird: they made it so that Bok Nam actually overheard them talking on the bus when they were headed to their wedding ceremony and found it weird how they were only talking about distribution of rent and chores. He just so happened to be working at their wedding ceremony as well, even was in the same room as them and he even talked with them and took their picture. With a face like his, he would be near impossible to forget. So how the hell did they not recognize him from the start from their wedding?? I thought they were going to come up with a good way to explain how Bok Nam knew so much about their relationship, but this was kind of unrealistic.

Anyways, after this Se Hee and Ji Ho get back together and then the next chapter starts: their families. I think this drama made a real critical remark about what marriage is supposed to be like and what it should be about. One of the approaches they took was showing the relationship between daughter/son-in-law and parents-in-law.
I think it was interesting what was said about the ‘Good Daughter-in-law Syndrome’. Even though Ji Ho was determined not to be taken by it, she found herself unable to escape it. It reminded me of Valid Love, in which the daughter-in-law had to take care of almost her whole in-law family because it was expected of her. Several characters from this series were sceptical towards the whole ‘taking care of the in-laws’ aspect of marriage.
For example, Ji Ho was pressured by Se Hee’s parents to help with ancestral rites, and even though Se Hee forbade her from going, she went because she still partially felt she had to as a daughter-in-law even though it wasn’t part of her contract with Se Hee. Se Hee wasn’t allowed to help her, she had to do all the chores herself. As a payback, Se Hee went to help Ji Ho’s parents in the countryside with making kimchi, even though it wasn’t expected of him as the son-in-law because Ji Ho’s family was a patriarchal family.
So in their two respective families the expectations of who was supposed to help with what were already very different.
I can understand very well, usually when you marry someone it’s out of love and I mean I wouldn’t really marry someone only to basically marry his parents as well. But I notice that in a lot of Asian countries this comes with it as a matter of fact.

Going on to the next side plot in the Korean remake: Se Hee’s past. It turns out that Se Hee used to be dating a girl from his university and when he incidentally got her pregnant, they were going to get married. However, she was from a poor family and his father just couldn’t accept it. He said it was a disgrace that his son was marrying someone because he impregnated her and they didn’t know anything about being married. To make matters worse, his girlfriend miscarried the child and this only labelled her even more as damaged goods to Se Hee’s father. Unable to deal the behavior of her future in-laws, she broke up with Se Hee, leaving him heartbroken and ever since he’s been shut off and against marriage. He has also developed a very bad relationship with his father because of it.

Of course, Ji Ho meets this woman. She’s called Go Jung Min (played by Lee Chung Ah) and she’s now a CEO for a media company. She’s interested in Ji Ho’s work as a script writer, even though Ji Ho has stopped working. The two women become very close in a short period of time, but Ji Ho quickly finds out between Se Hee and Jung Min’s past and this makes her a bit anxious.
Mainly because of the following scene: they’re talking about love one day and Ji Ho is trying to make clear that she’s in love with Se Hee, so she says something like ‘I think having one love in a lifetime is enough.’ Se Hee agrees with her. However, after finding out that Se Hee has had this experience with Jung Min, Ji Ho starts doubting. She feels like for him, agreeing with her words means that he’s already had this ‘one love’ and he doesn’t need it again.
At this point, I would say that emotionally-wise, they have a lot to talk about. Because both of them just didn’t understand the other’s intentions. They both couldn’t directly speak out what they were thinking, Ji Ho was being annoyingly cumbersome and honestly sometimes I couldn’t help but agree with Se Hee because even I didn’t know what she was getting at (until I would read the episode comments of course, because a lot of people watching are very sharp and clever and they make me go like ‘Ohhhhh hadn’t thought about it like that’).
The next-to-last episode for example, when Ji Ho suggested that they end the contract and she would go away for a while. Everyone just plain assumed that they were getting divorced and she would move out and they would stop seeing each other.
However, that wasn’t Ji Ho’s intention at all. It was her intention to divorce, yes, but not to break up with him. She loved him a lot at that point and she only felt like the contract marriage was in their way. She now wanted to get married because of love. Not even married per se, she just wanted to be with him because of love, not because of marriage.
But Se Hee didn’t understand that either. He just thought she didn’t like it/him anymore and she was going to leave after divorcing. She even packed her bags saying she was going on a long trip somewhere far away.
BUT then there was this moment, right before she left. I forgot to mention this, the two of them are big Arsenal fans and they often watched matches together and sometimes used soccer formulas to compare or explain things to each other. Anyhow, right before she left Ji Ho turns around and asks him: ‘Have you never wondered what soccer players do in the intermission time?’ And Se Hee just answers plainly: ‘Evaluate the first half and making strategies for the second half, I assume.’ And Ji Ho says: ‘I see. So there’s a lot to be done in the intermission, then.’ And then she leaves.
I feel like I missed a lot of these, but this was such a big metaphor she was using and Se Hee just didn’t get it. She was of course talking about their intermission, the things he should do and think about during their intermission.
Honestly I didn’t get it either, only because of the episode comments but then it all suddenly made sense. But I still think both of them should have been more clear about their intentions. Because when Ji Ho suddenly showed up again and Se Hee was like ‘wth I thought you left?? We got a divorce??’ and Ji Ho was like ‘what are you talking about?? You thought I’d leave for good??’ So yeah, definitely some room for improvement in the communication department there.
The funny thing was that they ended up exactly how it started. Since Ho Rang and Won Seok moved out of their rooftop apartment, they individually told Ji Ho and Se Hee about it (Se Hee sold his house after Ji Ho left) and they end up living together in the same house AGAIN. Of course with better results than the first time.

I like how they titled the episodes by the way. The reason why the series is called Because It’s My First Life really made sense at the end. The episodes are all titled ‘Because It’s My First ….. (kiss/marriage/confession/in-laws/intermission etc.)’
Honestly I could relate to Ji Ho so much in the beginning, to a painfully personal level. She was 30 and never had a boyfriend and after finding out about her failed crush she just kind of gives up and accepts that she’ll never have a dating life. And that thought actually inspires her to let it out more, even to the point of kissing a total stranger at a bus stop. Now I’m not saying I relate with that part specifically, but honestly there’s more of us near-30s-single-since-birth people out there. It’s not always easy.

The division of the conservative and the not conservative people in this drama is remarkable. There’s the people who still feel like the wife should just handle the household and bear children, and there’s the people who feel like these standards aren’t important, what’s important is just loving each other without having any conditions or rules they need to abide by. I could really understand Ji Ho’s final decision, even though she should’ve made it more clear with her words to Se Hee, because now all she did was just make people confused.

I’m going to go on with my personal opinions (since I dragged the story summary on a bit too much) about the actors and the characters.
I knew a few of the actors from other series, of course I knew Jung So Min from Mischievous Kiss and Sound of My Heart, but I actually haven’t watched any more of her. I think she’s a good actress and mainly because I think she acts with her eyes very well. Not many Asian actors can pull this off because of their facial structure, but it helped that they put in a lot of close-ups of Ji Ho and Se Hee looking at each other. Their eyes were speaking for them sometimes, and I thought that was very nice.
I have only seen two things of Lee Min Ki as well since he doesn’t do much. I was kind of shocked to find out that the only drama I saw with him (Shut Up Flower Boy Band from 2012, was actually also the last drama he did before this). In SUFBB he was only in the first episode but he was this crazy wacko with untidy hair and eyeliner and I absolutely loved him. It was funny to see him in such a different role this time. It makes me want to see more of him (ahem). I saw one movie with him, Quick, but I have to watch that one again I think since I don’t remember much of it.
Not to mention the chemistry between the two main leads was AMAZING. I haven’t felt this way since Just Between Lovers, where I was just waiting for them to be in a scene together again. Even when they weren’t even in love yet, the tension was sizzling. Also, the kissing scenes were very good. I approve.
I knew Kim Ga Eun (Ho Rang) only from her role in Reunited Worlds, but she was able to display much more acting skills in this role. I’ve seen many roles of Kim Min Seok (Shut Up Flower Boy Band, Who Are You – School 2015, Descendants of the Sun, Doctors, Age of Youth 2) and I think he’s really improving as an actor every time I see him in something. I think that’s great because I wouldn’t necessarily categorize him as the standard handsome guy and he probably won’t get a main lead role (after seeing a lot of dramas and seeing the same person as a side character too many times you can kind of guess), he has been getting more prominent and certainly more challenging roles.
The Ho Rang and Won Seok couple was very lovely, they portrayed a lot of realistic issues for a couple who has been together for ages but just can’t really seem to progress beyond that. And after living together for so long and being faced with things like marriage, you start doubting if your love will be strong enough to hold on through marriage and you start getting insecure about a lot of things.
I have to say Esom might be my new Kdrama girl crush, haha. I only know her from the Drama Special White Christmas which was really special, both in terms of cinematography as acting and story. I knew her face, but I thought I’d seen more of her. I saw on DramaWiki that she mainly did a lot of movies.
I think she is so gorgeous and model-like because she has such a high fashion kind of look and face. Anyways, she was definitely my favorite character in Because This is My First Life. But there were also times when I felt she was a bit contradictory. Because on the one hand she was this badass girl who didn’t seem to care about what anyone would think or say about her, this woman who would occasionally not wear a bra to work because it made her feel uncomfortable and stuffy. But on the other hand it seemed like she really cared about how people saw her, especially at work. She was very anxious that situations would arise where her harassment would become even worse.
When rumors start about her not wearing a bra to work and when Ma Sang Goo starts making moves at her, she pushes him away saying that he will only make her situation worse. When her boss would find out about her dating one of his business associates, it would only result in him harassing her more. If anything would go wrong, all the bad stories and rumors would be about her, not about the guy. She made a point of course, and this was also one of the main critiques of the series, that as a woman you’re way less free to do as you like than as a man, because people will always judge you if you do anything bold. But the moment she told Sang Goo that I was a little bit disappointed in her because I felt that she had it in her to not care about any of those things.
But I guess society does have this kind of pressure on people, no matter how modern they might be.
I didn’t know the actor playing Ma Sang Goo, but his character was very funny. Even though he was the CEO of a big company, he had his morals and even though it might be considered normal for women to be harassed on the work floor, he still couldn’t bring himself to accept it, even though he lost his main investment because he decided to say something about it.

One other funny side character was a girl from Se Hee’s work, Bo Mi (played by Bo Mi from Apink). In the end I wasn’t really sure what exactly her role function was except from being a funny side character. Her down-to-earth-ness was very refreshing though, she may have looked like a fuzzy cute pink-loving girl, but her dry way of speaking made it very amusing. She was one of the few people who managed to have real contact with Se Hee at work and she even (for one episode maybe) became a potential love interest for Won Seok after he broke up with Ho Rang. She showed him a graph from their app to show how well compatible they were.
Maybe that’s another thing the series meant to say. Love isn’t based on conditions. It’s not based on formulas. You shouldn’t love someone just because you’re compatible or your ideals match. In the end it’s about the love itself. If you’re not actually in love with someone, nothing will come of it.

Anyways, it feels like I’ve watched a very long drama even though it’s only been 16 episodes but I liked it a lot. It really drew me in, and I enjoyed the chemistry between the two main leads. Even though it turned out to be a lot different from NigeHaji, I think this version earned some extra points because of their critique of several topics in society which a lot of Korean dramas usually treat as a taboo. I was positively surprised by the sexual references -I even had to look away sometimes because they were so explicit I felt a bit embarrassed. I don’t mean explicit as in nudity or anything like that, but just the kissing and the fantasies Ji Ho started to see as she started falling for Se Hee (zooming in on his lips and stuff like that). But it made the show very contemporary and accessible, because in truth people are like this. Both in good and bad ways.
That’s why I’m really curious as to how this series and the critiques in the series was received by the Korean viewers, especially the parts with sexual harassment on the work floor. Is it still considered a taboo or are people starting to look at it more critically?
Also about the concept of marriage – what it is and why people want to do it. I hope it lit a fire in many people’s minds to think about this more with their hearts instead of their heads. The circumstances are different for every single person, but shouldn’t the first and primary reason to get married be because of love? Should you even get married because of love, because it will mean you get a whole load of responsibilities and expectations with it?
It’s interesting to think about. We tend to assume it’s a normal thing to do when you love someone, but sometimes we fail to really understand what the consequences may be.

A very eye-opening drama indeed, I was not expecting this, but I like dramas that are open-minded and provide a new insight to social issues. A very nice watch.