by Jo Eunyoung (South Korea, poet); see also Meet Me at Three O’clock at the LerDevagar Bookstore and The Summer We Once Wanted
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“Noblesse Matchmaking — we find you the partner you deserve.“
Even past forty, matchmaking agencies still send me messages. Maybe I’m still on their list of women who haven’t — or couldn’t — marry. Maybe it’s just an automated system firing into the void. Either way, I feel two things at once: a small admiration for their persistence, and a faint irritation at still being considered a target. I never delete the messages immediately. I leave them there for hours, as if one day even this might begin to feel urgent.
One day, a younger colleague leaned in close, as if sharing classified information. “Unni, I actually met my husband through a matchmaking agency (gyeolhon jeongbo hoesa: Korea’s paid marriage brokerage service that scores and ranks members by age, education, income, and appearance). You should try it too — I worked really hard at it.” She believed she was doing me a favor. The story of their fated, romantic meeting had apparently been constructed overnight — a tidy narrative designed to erase the fact that it had started with a checklist.
It’s not that I never tried. I dated steadily, loved recklessly. I was a bitch to some and an angel to others, just as certain exes were to me. I broke up and started over, again and again, and somewhere in that repetition, time slipped away — “hulsseok”(the sound Koreans make while swallowing tears).
People offered what they called gentle advice. You studied too long. You were too focused on work. They followed this with their own marriage success stories. A question rose in my throat — so are you actually happy?— but I swallowed it every time. I didn’t want to come across as the bitter unmarried woman, sneering at other people’s choices.
What they said always sounded less like advice and more like self-reassurance: that raising children is nobler than any career, that some men feel burdened by women who think too much, that love is fine but marriage is reality. I listened and nodded. You’re doing so well. I’m honestly envious. It was the kindest thing I could offer.
They say marriage is a choice now. But most people I know — born, like me, in the 1980s — didn’t quite choose it or reject it. They simply married, the way you do things when that’s just what’s done. A small number of us didn’t. Not entirely by choice, but not entirely by accident either. I live in the gap between those two worlds, and sometimes it’s hard to breathe.
I had actually joined that agency years earlier. Even then, in my mid-thirties, I was categorized as high-risk — too old for safe childbirth, too educated to be appealing. My PhD was a liability, they said; men worried I might correct them. They suggested I list only my bachelor’s degree. Still, they found reasons for optimism: I looked younger than my age, I wasn’t overweight, and my voice was soft and pleasant.
Suddenly I was a product approaching its expiration date. A new agency promised AI-based matching, as if intimacy were a logistics problem. When I saw the ad, I thought: I’ve walked into the wrong place entirely.
This isn’t where I belong. Run.
An unmarried woman in her forties. Neither young nor old. Studying literature. On television, forty-something single women are always successful — corner offices and sleek apartments. The term gold miss (a glamorous, financially independent single woman) comes from that image.
But I can’t claim the gold. My degree didn’t translate into salary. I spend my nights revising poems, asking myself: will I ever publish a collection? Will I become the poet I want to be? I am, by most measures, badly out of step with this era.
I can’t join my friends’ conversations about stocks, real estate, their children’s tutoring costs, the latest housing policy. I’ve grown a little strange, just as they predicted. The future still frightens me, but I’ve stopped chasing someone to make that fear quieter. That’s left me lonelier in some ways.
I’ve also stopped obsessing over my weight. I prefer streets with trees to streets with people. I’ve started to understand why middle-aged people photograph flowers. I have no children, but I tend my writing with the same careful attention — softly, gently — and I love it deeply. I take care of myself. I protect my small world.
Then I heard that younger Koreans had coined a term for people like me: yeong-poti (Young Forty: started as a compliment for energetic forty-somethings, now a slur for those who refuse to act their age). I checked myself against the criteria. I don’t wear streetwear brands. I have no money to spend chasing younger company. I didn’t buy property cheaply and profit from rising prices. I wasn’t even pretending to be young. I’ve just never quite grown up, if I’m honest.
In the marriage market: not on the list. Among the targets of generational contempt: not on that list either. Nowhere do I fit neatly into the available categories. For a while, I shrank under the weight of that. The world says it has changed — women’s rights, feminism, marriage as personal choice. In some ways, yes. But I still have one foot in a world that sees my life as a problem, and one foot in a world that has no name for what I am. Too hot, too cold. I move between them, belonging fully to neither.
I live alone. I cook for myself. I write. I handle each poem the way you’d handle something you love — carefully, then carelessly, fighting with it, making up with it, coming back to it again. Sometimes someone looks me in the eyes first, and there is warmth. Not fire, but warmth. Somewhere between the cold bath and the hot one, in that lukewarm in-between place — that’s where I am.
