I was so immensely disappointed in the the way this show got derailed towards the end. When it began, the issues and concepts that My 1st Life touched on were very well tackled. It subverted the whole institution of marriage and examined the cultural and political angles of it. However, because the female protag was a Lit grad somehow this signaled to the screenwriter that it was ok for the show to descend into some emo cliche interspersed with Lit references to somehow make it really meaningful and deep... when it ain't.

The whole arrangement that the two protags had were perfectly rational and works. Then the female protag decides to overstep her boundaries and gets upset with the male for standing his ground and drawing the boundary lines clearly. I think from there it was clear to me that this show won't live up to its original premise of being a groundbreaker in the construct of marriage and, sure enough, Ji-Ho continues on this vein of irrational decision-making throughout the rest of the series. Because they need to stretch it to 16 eps, the pace suddenly slows around I-can't-remember-anymore-tbh. I found myself checking on the speed on my TV to make sure it isn't a technical issue on my end but no, it's totally the show. The chars are reduced to stretching out conversations in lifeless tones, all snail speed (maybe aligning with Ji-Ho's love for snails) with interspersed broken pieces of internal monologue and emo music. This is meant to be a TV series. It just ended up being an attempt at a film noire/art festival/avant garde kind of filmmaking that's pretentiously desperate. Viewers aren't dumb.

Honestly, I stayed till the end because of the cat! As other reviews have indicated, Ji-Ho's behaviour is toxic AF. Her reasonings—delivered in broken pieces with emo drama music—are so nonsense that even her mother says, "you're talking crap". It was just really painful to watch if not for Soo Ji's arc AND THE CAT! Whatever "intellectual" proposition the series wanted to make on the topic of marriage was thrown out the window episodes ago and in the end, we're left with characters with conflicting behaviours (first the groom's dad was anti-marriage, then he wasn't), BS profiling (Ji-Ho's mum stayed with the dad coz she remembers how he was so sweet to her when they were dating... yeah, she's full of sh#t too. If she'd won the lottery, she'd have been outta there so fast she'd have left skit marks) and shallow motivations (Ho Rang pressures the hell out of Won Seok to get married and have babies ASAP so desperately to fit in with and be approved by girls whom don't matter at all—WTF). In the end, all the stuff that the show was trying to subvert were reinforced, along with a mystery baby in Won Seok's arms (we are left with the assumption that it belongs to him and Ho Rang) to complete the whole marriage-and-baby-is sacrosanct construct.

All in all, it was a dishonest series that utilised a subversive concept that had so much potential for illuminating the different angles of love for a gimmick purpose.

F#ck this series. "Extremely disappointed" doesn't even begin to describe it. I feel sorry that the cat had to sit through her emo co-stars.