
What do you think decides love? We often choose love based on our own conditions, such as appearance, personality, or attitude. But imagine someone who doesn't accord with these conditions coming to you and whispering of love. In this situation, is it impossible to love him? The novel Only Han-ah on Earth makes us rethink the essence of love through an encounter with a stranger. This article explores an unconditional love found in the encounter.
The main character, Han-ah, is someone who waits for her boyfriend Kyung-min in resignation, enduring his frequent disappearances without explanation. One day, Kyung-min returns from a trip to Canada, acting unusually caring and gentle, different from his usual behavior, so Han-ah feels something strange. But she later realizes that this strange Kyung-min is an alien who took the form of her boyfriend. It turns out, the alien had admired her from another planet, then made a deal with the real Kyung-min in Canada to switch bodies with each other and come to her. At first, Han-ah feels shocked and repulsed, but she gradually opens her heart to the alien Kyung-min’s sincere attitude and eventually comes to love him truly.
This story is about transcendent love between a human and an alien. Han-ah gradually opens her mind to the alien Kyung-min and experiences real love through him. The transcendent love described in this work is not simply love in an unrealistic relationship between a human and an alien. Instead, it means liking someone without a specific reason. When we start to like someone without knowing why, we can grow our love by discovering the reasons for that feeling one by one. Love can bloom even without conditions. Today, many people tend to set their own ideal type and look only for someone who fits into that standard. But sometimes, we can find ourselves truly loving someone without any conditions of our own.
So, when we love someone, what is the reason behind it? If the reason disappears, can we keep that love? As we choose love, we should look back on ourselves to see whether we are too trapped by our own standards and thus missing true love, while checking our attitude toward love.