Hong Ji-min: My husband's sudden divorce request was due to our different love languages

Musical actress Hong Ji-min has candidly shared the marital crises she experienced with her husband and the process of overcoming them. She revealed that cracks in their relationship, caused by a life overly focused on work, and the realization that they were expressing love in different ways, became the turning point for their reconciliation.

On the 22nd, Hong appeared on the YouTube channel 'Saeropge Hasoseo' and revealed everything from her meeting with her husband, Do Seong-su, to the crisis that arrived after marriage and the process of overcoming it.

The two met at a salsa bar and tied the knot after seven months of dating. At the time, Hong recalled that her affection for her husband was greater than anyone else's.

However, an unexpected crisis arrived around their seventh year of marriage. Her husband suddenly brought up the words, "Let's get a divorce."

"It was after about seven years. Looking back now, it seems my husband had been enduring it for a long time," Hong shared regarding the situation. "When he suddenly said let's divorce, I asked for the reason, and he said, 'You don't love me.' He said, 'If you loved me, you couldn't do that.'"

Upon hearing her husband's words, she retraced the causes and realized that her life had been flowing too heavily toward work.

"I was a workaholic. I loved working and I loved meeting people," Hong said. "But it was different when we were dating. I loved my husband so much that I didn't even look at auditions and focused only on our relationship. I would go to his place and cook for him, acting like a devoted housemate."

However, the situation changed after marriage. Upon marrying, she resumed her acting career and had to handle a backlog of projects. "I had to work immediately after getting married. At first, my husband would come to see my musicals and join my company dinners, but that only lasted a day or two," she explained. "Gradually, my husband grew exhausted, and at some point, he brought up divorce, saying, 'This isn't the marriage I imagined.'"

She also felt a great sense of unfairness. This was because she had not committed infidelity and believed she had done her best economically for her family.

"I didn't go out and do anything else; I worked to earn money," Hong confessed. "Starting from difficult circumstances, we came to live in a 53-pyeong apartment and even drive foreign cars. At first, I even thought, 'I've become too complacent.' I felt like, 'How fiercely have I lived for these seven years?'"

Ultimately, however, she decided to re-examine the relationship. "Since it was impossible to resolve, I said, 'Option 1 is to divorce, Option 2 is to try harder,'" Hong revealed. "But my husband chose Option 2 immediately without hesitation. That was when we decided to try once more."

However, the process of restoring the relationship was not easy either. They even received marriage counseling, but there were practical difficulties.

"We did marriage counseling over the phone, and they told me to quit everything and just stay home. But that was impossible for me," she said. "Then, I happened to attend a lecture called 'The 5 Love Languages.' What we needed was to understand each other's way of expressing love."

'The 5 Love Languages' is a concept that love is expressed through five ways: quality time, words of affirmation, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch.

Hong stated that she realized the ways she and her husband valued love were different.

"I valued physical touch, while my husband valued quality time," she said. "If my husband had valued gifts, the mention of divorce might not have even happened. I thought I had done so much, like gifting him a foreign car, but what my husband needed most wasn't material things, but quality time together."

The first change Hong implemented was 'having breakfast together.'

"The first thing I started was eating breakfast together," she said. "It was a small change, but through that time, we began to talk, and our relationship recovered quickly."

Hong's confession shows that the cause of conflict in a marriage is not necessarily an absence of love, but may be because the two parties are giving and receiving love in different ways. While devotion to the family was an expression of love for one person, quality time was a greater love language for the other.

Musical actress Hong Ji-min, who has captivated audiences on the glamorous stage, conveyed through this confession that even couples who appear perfect need constant understanding and effort to maintain their relationship. She left a message that love does not persist through emotion alone, but only fully reaches the other person when it is delivered in the way they desire.