Looking at male lead Joo Hyuk, he is a very very average man. Used to working hard. Too soft-hearted. I’m not calling him kind-hearted, he doesn’t cave with the first push because he is too kind, it’s just because he cannot say no. He is also unlucky. You know that kind of guy. He is the one that always gets splashed on, the one who always gets saddled with the difficult customer. There are lots of people like that. It is not their fault. They kinda get used to it. But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t wear them down.
A schoolgirl gets an immediate crush on him and he is quite firm in avoiding her at first until she tempts him with a large tutoring pay. He still refuses her while being her tutor.
The girl loses her father and in grief latches onto him and as always he cannot say no. He remains by the family’s side, and as her tutor, until she comes of age. He then starts dating her and eventually marries her.
I’m sure he loved her in his own mild simple way, but he definitely never was crazy in love. She is pretty and cute and madly in love with him and has been stuck to him for the past few years. It was probably impossible not to fall for her.
Fast-forward a few years. He is still the average too-soft-hearted hard-working unlucky man, and she… she is a disaster.

Now looking at female lead Woo Jin. She is a careless happy-go-lucky girl who obviously isn’t doing well in school as her mother is ready to pay so much for tutoring. She falls for JH at first sight, and the rest of her days are simply about one thing only: her love for him.
She continues to study only to be near him. Dates and marries him. Goes to a lowly work, has kids, and the reality of life hits her like a truck of doom.
She has probably never learned any kind of time or life management. Looking at her in the beginning of the show DESTROYS me. The poor woman is screaming silently (and sometimes not so silently) from severe depression. She went from being a kid with no thought, to a kid with only one sole purpose in life, straight to a clueless woman in the middle of a low-income family needing lots of management.
Then the time-travel and the parallel world happened. People were right in saying that JH deserved to be unhappy in his new life and WJ deserved to marry his coworker and have her own life. End of the story.
The first time I watched it I really felt the ending forced and pointless. I probably went and rewatched GBC immediately.
Then I rewatched the show and was like OH!

This is not JH’s story AT ALL. He is only a device. A switch. An observer. A narrator. The story is wholey and completely about giving WJ a new chance at real life. At growing up. Finding things to do, and care for, in life. Becoming her own mature woman. Learning to take care of herself, her mother, a home, and a whole business if need arises. Discovering this has made the show a completely different experience for me.
Although it still manages to break me everytime bacause my heart bleeds for all those depressed young mothers that will never have this magical chance at growing up.