Watching the Secret Love Affair, I kept thinking of Virginia Woolf’s remark about George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, that it was the rarity of rarities, a novel for adults. And I kept thinking of the remark because it wasn’t easy to look beyond the age difference and sympathize with the drama’s lovers. It really took the adult in me not to be cynical and dismissive of the love affair and of the show, for that matter, as a sort of a vehicle for advancing a feminist agenda. Then there was the setting: the academic world of the rich, the cultured, and the ruthlessly ambitious which lends the show an air of sophistication the youngster in me initially found pretentious. Needless to say, I got over my biases and I was rewarded. Secret Love Affair is a stylish, intriguing drama that confronts its heroine with the most impossible of choices: Give up everything you ever lived for and live in poverty for love or continue to live for ambition and deny your feelings unto eternity. I knew the first option was unlikely. (K-Drama does not do poverty and squalor even if passionate love is at the heart of it.) I thought the second option was the only option but a bad option nonetheless. As it turned out, there was a third option, and it revolved around a funny development in the story. Everyone, who means anything to the two lovers, finds out about the affair, but no one condemns the couple. Friends are supportive, and friends who aren’t real friends promise to sweep it under the rug provided the heroine takes the fall for the financial indiscretion of a higher up, or so I gathered. (My attention waned towards the end.) As befitting a heroine, the heroine defies her enemies and protects her lover. The way she does it—acting as if she has done nothing wrong—however doesn’t do much to build the drama to an exciting ending. It was fun getting there though.