In romance-obsessed South Korea, Black Day gives singles a chance to commiserate—and drown their sorrows in a bowl of black bean noodles.
“It’s almost like a self-deprecating joke,” says Summer Jung, a research fellow at Stanford who grew up in Seoul. “[Singles] are commiserating but also celebrating.”
After I mourned my situation with a native Korean friend, she demanded that I come over for some jjajangmyeon for Black Day. This, who was 32 to my 20, had been single for a decade, and her plan was to circumnavigate the globe solo after graduate school. Sitting in her cramped, cluttered apartment, stacked high with papers andradish that perfectly lightened the heavy black bean sauce.
Black Day taught me that friends and food are a curative fount, and that fount flows with an endless supply of umami-explosive black bean sauce, best experienced with other singles. Like our Instagram friend @hongseokhwa92, I ate to bursting, hailed a cab, and lay down directly upon arriving home. Call it triaging Maslow’s hierarchy, but a food coma always helps a broken heart sleep a little easier.
“In Korean society, if you're older than 25 and haven't dated anyone, they call you a magician, because it’s like you can perform magic because you're so rare and unique,” Jung says. “So I think that tells you how much pressure and social stigma there is against single people.” That pressure tends to peak in the spring, the season of matchmaking, in anticipation of Silver Day , when couples exchange silver promise rings and potential spouses are introduced to families.
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