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[Feel Korea 02] What Do You Call Loving Someone You Can't Stand?

 

These days, when you stop liking someone, the solution is usually simple. You cut them off. You block them. You never see them again.

If your feelings are gone, ending the relationship feels like the obvious, rational move — no wonder "the courage to be disliked" has become such a popular idea.

I get it. Honestly, I agree with that logic most of the time.

But spend enough time in Korean society, and you start noticing strange scenes. Someone who was grumbling "ugh, I can't stand the sight of him" just yesterday shows up the next morning with a coffee for that exact person. They clearly seem to dislike each other, and yet the moment things get hard, they're the first ones to show up for each other. People who were fighting an hour ago end up sharing dinner and soju by the end of the week.

What is going on here?

Koreans gave this feeling a name a long time ago.

Jeong (정).

The Word That Doesn't Translate

People have tried translating jeong into English for decades. Affection. Attachment. Bond. Every word comes up slightly short. Maybe that's because jeong isn't really one emotion to begin with.

For Koreans, jeong isn't just warmth. It's the impulse to hand your umbrella to a stranger, the extra handful a market vendor tosses in "for free," the willingness to walk a lost tourist all the way to their destination — but it's also the stubborn refusal to look away from someone after years of friction and disappointment.

So Korean has two versions: go-un-jeong, the "sweet" kind, and miun-jeong — literally "hateful jeong," the kind wrapped in irritation.

The Sweet Kind Everyone Already Knows

Go-un-jeong isn't hard to understand. It's the warmth of an older hiker offering a snack to a stranger on the trail — kindness extended to someone you've just met.

But is that really unique to Korea? Hospitality toward strangers exists everywhere. If anything, go-un-jeong feels less like a distinctly Korean trait and more like a Korean name for a kindness that already belongs to everyone.

Miun-Jeong: The Kind That Only Time Can Make

Miun-jeong is different.

It never appears with someone you just met. It only shows up after you've spent real time with a person — disappointed by them, hurt by them, thought "we are just not compatible" more times than you can count — and the relationship still didn't end.

Here's where people get it wrong, though: miun-jeong isn't hatred that quietly turned into love.

It's closer to this — jeong was there from the start, and years of small frustrations and complaints and half-love, half-resentment piled on top of it like sediment. That's why Koreans say, "even miun-jeong is still jeong."

The main character of this feeling was never the dislike. Jeong was always underneath. The dislike is just the expression sitting on top of it.

Picture a small café down some alley in Seoul. There's a regular who comes in at the same time every day, and the owner is always a little blunt with him. "Late again today." "Do you even sleep?" "You'll catch a cold dressed like that." The customer thinks to himself, more nagging, great.

Then one winter morning, he walks in coughing, and the owner sets down a hot cup of ginger tea without a word. It's not even on the menu. She doesn't charge him for it. That's when he understands — the nagging didn't suddenly turn into kindness. The kindness was already there all along.

A Society That Couldn't Easily Cut Ties

Nobody has a clean answer for why this feeling took root here. But it's worth considering that Korea was, for a long time, a society where you couldn't easily walk away from people.

Family, neighbors, school, work, hometown, relatives — everyone was tightly woven together, and there weren't that many people you could simply decide never to see again just because you didn't like them. Maybe Koreans had to learn to keep living alongside people, rather than cutting them out.

A society that couldn't easily let go of people may have produced an emotion that doesn't easily let go, either. Maybe, instead of eliminating conflict, people chose to let time slowly transform it.

That's why I want to call miun-jeong a relationship fermented by time.

Of course, not every relationship that lasts turns into jeong. Some relationships genuinely need to end. If someone keeps hurting you, what you need isn't more time — it's distance.

Even a Rice Cake for Someone You Can't Stand

There's an old Korean saying: "give an extra rice cake to the person you dislike." People say "ugh, that person" while still taking care of them, sighing "it's this jeong that gets me every time" — and there are plenty of people like that in Korea. And yet, why on earth would you give more rice cake to someone you can't stand?

Understanding jeong isn't about memorizing a vocabulary word. It's closer to a key that explains why Koreans have such a hard time simply cutting people off.

In truth, you can't even cleanly divide jeong into "sweet" and "hateful." Most relationships carry both at once, and the ratio just keeps shifting with time and experience.

Maybe once you understand miun-jeong, Korea starts to look a little warmer. If you want to feel it for yourself, spend a little longer here sometime. And don't worry — you'll run into a lot more of the sweet kind than the hateful kind.

Curious about Korea?

So am I.

May we, too, stick around long enough to let a little jeong grow.

Further Reading

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