Good News [Our Story About 'Today']

The express bus to Gangnam is as red as the rage of a generation that has given up on marriage, homeownership and children. Crammed into that scarlet bus, I scroll through YouTube when a headline catches my eye.

"Korea is getting married again... Marriage rate rebounds, trend continues into 2026."

It's a dazzling article. That's not an exaggeration — I'm sitting by a sun-drenched window and my eyes are literally dazzled. I crank my phone brightness to maximum. The bus is already spinning around the curve of Cheongdam Bridge, and the glare on top of last night's hangover is enough to drive me mad. The night before, I had drunk a little too hard at a friend's bachelorette party. The bride-to-be, on the eve of her transformation, had treated us through three rounds, her skin glowing like a red apple after some kind of skin treatment. My memory cuts out after that, but one moment stayed with me. I was holding forth in front of a shriveled hot pot of some kind. These days, I said, I only get invited to two kinds of gatherings. Know what they are? One is the kind where you get a wedding invitation. The other is the kind where you think — wait, are they calling me over just to hand me a wedding invitation? You could call them the wedding crowd and the wedding-maybe crowd. Ha! Nobody laughed.

I woke up flat on my bed, socks still on. No time to be embarrassed about my drunken rambling — I splashed some water on my hair and walked out the door. It was the weekend. I had to get to Seunggang's wedding. Seunggang was a junior from my army days, and it felt like just yesterday he was crying about having no way to make a living after discharge, yet somehow he had beaten me to the altar. The venue was in Cheongdam. Nice spot. Did his in-laws help out? My stomach churns. No time to nurse the hangover. There had better be galbi soup at the buffet.

The news article doesn't seem to be exaggerating, at any rate. My weekend schedule is packed solid with weddings — friends, seniors, juniors, cousins, all somehow pulling off marriages one after another. Nine times out of ten, the ones delivering wedding news ask the same thing: So, any good news from you? I give the same answer: No news is good news. They laugh. Let me know when you have something. I smile back and think to myself: As if I wouldn't. Do you have any idea how much wedding-gift money I've been hauling around?

I hate good news. At some point, other people's good news started landing on me like a blow. As for me — I'm in a relationship, but something is blocking the way to whatever comes next, and so I've been in this relationship for nine years with no end in sight. Nine years is more than enough time to build memories. We've been on plenty of dates and plenty of trips (Europe we've been saving — we looked up flights to Barcelona once and agreed to leave Europe for the honeymoon). We've done a lot, really. We blended our own perfume, took yoga classes, hauled coal briquettes as volunteers and fired live rounds at a shooting range. And now that we've run out of things to do, we go to PlayStation cafes. We sit in the couples' seats and play two-player co-op games. We're good at it. Without a word, we reach out and pull the rope, clear the obstacles, solve the puzzles together. Then we say goodbye. See you next time. Nothing to fight about, nothing to get stuck on. We're that good.

But sometimes I imagine the moment when one of us throws down the joystick and says: I'm sick of this. I'm done. For a while now, we've been circling the same stage. We've jumped over traps, defeated bosses, opened treasure chests and pushed through. But somehow the key to unlocking the next stage is nowhere to be found. While we wander, friends who've made it to marriage are enjoying their newlywed lives — doing what feels like a more impressive set of hobbies. On weekends they push strollers through suburban outlet malls, drink coffee at the sprawling cafes that wealthy parents hand down to their children, and fly off to Barcelona on vacation. There, they find new shared goals to carry them to the next stage. They find the conditions to clear the quest. What could those conditions be?

Over nine years of dating, I became a ninth-year doctoral student and my girlfriend became a ninth-year theater actor. We've each reached the point where we can order whatever delivery food we want in our respective labs and rehearsal rooms. A few days ago we exchanged 3,000-day anniversary gifts. As the relationship grew longer, we naturally stopped marking every hundred days, but the number 3,000 still carried some weight. After some deliberation, we decided to keep the gifts modest. Then, somehow, things felt awkward between us for a few days, until we both admitted we didn't really want anything. We had already given each other too much over the years. There was an LP turntable and a Nintendo Switch that hadn't been touched in years. A Dyson hair dryer. A Yves Saint Laurent lipstick and a Le Labo perfume. We'd eaten at an omakase restaurant, chopsticks trembling. Last year we gave each other mattresses for our birthdays. At some point, your money became my money and my money became yours, and giving an expensive gift started to draw eye-rolls. We ultimately decided to keep it to around 100,000 won — 50,000 felt too little, 200,000 felt too much.

I gave her a special edition of the Nintendo game Animal Crossing. There is no "clear" in Animal Crossing. You can catch bugs and go fishing and stay on the same stage forever without ever seeing an ending, and it's still enjoyable. Inside our own little forest, the good news of others doesn't reach us. Her gift, on the other hand, caught me off guard. Inside a white envelope were 100,000 won worth of lottery tickets. We nodded at each other. Right. This is it. What we needed. What lies ahead of us. Two answers to the same question.

Somehow, I had no desire to check the results. I slipped the lottery receipt back into the envelope and tucked it carefully into a corner of my bag.

The wedding hall occupied an entire gleaming building. It looked like the entrance to a dungeon you'd have to clear to reach the next stage. The indoor lobby smelled like a department store. Men and women dressed to the nines filled the space — true masters of the game. I stopped by the restroom to check my reflection. I looked hollow-eyed. I reached for a lip balm, then thought: what does it matter? It's not my party. That's what it means to be a wedding guest. One face blurs into the next — in the end, all that survives a wedding is the guest registry and the gift amounts.

I headed to the ATM in the basement and joined the line, mentally weighing the value of my friendship with Seunggang. Giving 50,000 won as a wedding gift was practically vandalism in this day and age. So it had to be 100,000 won — but then I remembered some army buddies had said they couldn't make it and had sent 100,000 won each. Since I was staying for the meal, I wondered if I should give more. But 150,000 felt like an odd number — couples don't even celebrate 150 days together. That meant 200,000 won — but then I thought of the middle school friend I'd given 200,000 won to just last weekend, someone I'd known for nearly 20 years, who had even come to my grandmother's funeral. My sense of justice would not allow me to put those two friendships at the same price.

Please select your transaction.

The ATM nudged me. It was already my turn. I jabbed at the barely responsive touchscreen and felt a sudden surge of resentment. Marriage, when you thought about it, was arriving in order of income bracket, and those who were doing well were raiding the wallets of people whose turn hadn't come yet — people who might never get their turn at all. It seemed wrong. Wasn't the person being celebrated supposed to be the one treating others? Why were the haves squeezing the last drop out of the have-nots? If I had put the 100,000 to 200,000 won I spent on wedding gifts each week into a savings account instead, I might have been on a flight to Barcelona long ago. This could not be ignored. If things ever went sideways, I would hold a non-wedding ceremony of my own.

Excuse me? My train of thought ran long, and now the person behind me was pressing. I snapped back, bowed in apology and quickly withdrew the cash. Right. 100,000 won is enough. The amount isn't what matters. I grabbed two crisp 50,000-won notes, stuffed them into the envelope I'd brought and shoved it into my bag.

The rest was predictable. I greeted Seunggang warmly at the gift table — his face freshly injected with something — (So, any good news from you, hyung?), wrote my name on the envelope and handed it to the attendants, exchanged brief hellos with a few familiar faces. I half-watched the ceremony, confirmed the bride's face, then slipped out to eat. She was radiant. Looking at the spread, 100,000 won probably barely covered the groom's costs. The galbi soup came with a generous heap of braised tendon, and I drank it down eagerly.

About a month passed. By then I had become a ninth-year-and-one-month perennial doctoral student, and my girlfriend had become a ninth-year-and-one-month theater actor. A dispute among professors had upended my research topic, and I was something in between — old enough to have a beard, but not old enough to be included in the adults' affairs. My girlfriend was performing in a small staged reading, but she kept getting so caught up in it that she threw her whole body into the performance and was told to tone it down. On weekends we went on dates. We kept failing to clear the final stage.

I got word that there was an after-party for the wedding. More precisely, I heard about it secondhand — a friend who had been invited mentioned it to me. Didn't you get the message? he asked. I hadn't received anything directly, but I figured it must have slipped through the cracks and didn't think much of it. The venue was a worn-down old tavern near Jongno. The newlywed said he'd been eating nothing but rich food on the honeymoon and was craving something sharp and Korean. The grandmother who ran the place was fierce, and the spicy braised chicken didn't go down easily to begin with. When the drinks had flowed enough, Seunggang turned to a friend across the table and said:

"Hey, why did you give so much as a wedding gift?"

The friend answered with a kind of theatrical bravado.

"I'll get it all back eventually. Just wait. I think I'll have some good news soon."

Everyone cheered and clapped. But for some reason, in that moment, I caught Seunggang's eye in a strange way.

Seunggang then pulled out small wrapped envelopes one by one, saying they were souvenirs from the trip. Small ceramic plates from Barcelona.

"These are expensive, aren't they?"

Someone recognized them.

"No, no. There was some good news."

Seunggang waved it off. What other good news could there have been, besides the wedding? I asked.

"Good news?"

Instead of answering, Seunggang just grinned. Then he changed the subject — a story about running into a street hustler in Rome. The person had offered to take their photo as if doing them a favor, then suddenly demanded money. He said it was awkward, that the person clung to them with a sob story, and that they'd finally gotten away by handing over a few coins. Seunggang showed a photo from that moment. In it, he and his wife were beaming against a backdrop of bright sky and the Colosseum.

The conversation drifted to topics like their new home, plans for children and a family car they were considering. These were subjects I naturally had no place in, so I just sipped my drink awkwardly. I even began to feel that Seunggang was somehow reluctant to talk to me. Then, while the others' attention shifted elsewhere, Seunggang leaned toward me and whispered: "Hyung, can we talk for a minute later?" From that point on, my mind was unsettled. Why? Could it be — the 100,000-won gift?

As more rounds came and went, my thoughts grew more tangled. It wasn't a large amount, but it wasn't an absurd one either. Then the irritation rose. Come to think of it, he had always been a bit petty — the kind of person who mentally calculated the worth of a friendship. But would he really bring it up to my face like this? Couldn't he at least consider the circumstances of someone who had shown up in person to celebrate? I could picture Seunggang and his bride sitting across from each other in their honeymoon suite, comparing the gift amounts from their guests. In some romantic boutique hotel with a terrace, sipping Barcelona cava.

In the grimy tavern bathroom, I looked up the ceramic plates he'd handed out as gifts. They cost more than I expected. I should have given my girlfriend one of those instead of Animal Crossing for the 3,000-day anniversary. She might have kept it as a token of a Barcelona trip yet to come. Instead of staring at an endless, tedious game stage, she might have looked at the cobalt-blue glaze on the plate and imagined the Mediterranean. I checked my phone. There was a message from her.

"Don't be too late coming home. We're meeting Wednesday, remember."

The urge to drink faded. It was time to return to the stage where we were supposed to be. I slipped out of the bathroom and quietly made my way to the register without the others noticing. I could hear them laughing and talking in the distance. "I'd like to pay." I held out my card, and the grandmother barked that she only took cash. I rummaged through my bag, not sure if I had any. My hand caught on a white envelope. I looked inside — two crisp 50,000-won notes. Why was this still here?

"Hey, why are you leaving already — wait!"

Seunggang had spotted me and came rushing over. "I told you I had something to say to you, hyung. It's just —" He looked a little sheepish and fumbled for words.

"When I saw what you gave as a gift, I was honestly a little surprised. I'd never gotten a gift like that before. But I figured you must have had your reasons. And actually, thinking about it, I found it kind of funny. So my wife and I checked the results together at the hotel —"

Results? I was confused. What was he talking about?

"I told you I had some good news, right? I've been going back and forth all day about whether to tell you — but I felt like I had to tell you, of all people."

Seunggang paused, then seemed to make up his mind and opened his mouth. He began to move closer. Only then did I cover my mouth with my hands. I missed my girlfriend. Good news that I could not face alone was approaching. A murmur escaped from between my palms. No... no...