Seoul, South Korea: 37° 32' 24" N, 127° 07' 34" E
My walking partner, Lee Junseok, and I are hiking across South Korea. We are staying in love motels.
What is a Korean love motel?
From the outside, such establishments look much like any commercial lodging. Indeed, many are wholly ordinary in appearance, even low-key: aging faux brick facades, sliding glass doors activated by touch, and an electric sign dusted by carbon pollution. Inside, the transformation into something special begins. First: The clerk is hidden inside a frosted glass booth. (The clerks are usually a man.) You must transact business through a wicket, a small opening of the type that guards push meals through in prison doors. The clerk cannot see you. You cannot see him. This is by design: anonymity. Sometimes, check-in requires no human interaction at all. In the dim lobbies hum automated machines. They look like canned beverage dispensers. You feed them money. They issue your door key. Inside the rooms, more clues appear. Heart-shaped beds. Elaborate hygienic amenities. (Sachets of perfume, cologne, and mouthwash, as well as sanitizing alcohol and condoms.) Windows are optional. In one such room, I discover a laminated menu—not for food but listing women performers available for hire, each photographed attired in the exhausted tropes of male fantasy. (Nun, dominatrix, air steward.) Bought love. Hence: love motel. One rents the rooms by the hour.
Most love motels provide a place where young Korean couples can enjoy fleeting privacy—away from the family gaze.
Out of Eden Walk
“Tell him we need two rooms for the whole night,” I instruct Lee at one such establishment.
Lee bends to convey this information in Korean through the clerk’s tiny window. There is an exclamation of surprise from behind the opaque glass.
“Ask if I may borrow a desk and chair,” I also remind Lee, because I am a writer. And from behind the glass comes an even louder grunt of astonishment.
After one such request, the love motel clerk opened his booth door. He emerged blinking like a troglodyte, and handed over the stool he was sitting on. He was middle-aged, clad in a singlet, with a mussed comb-over and pot belly. Such customer service is rare anywhere these days.
Love motels are inexpensive: perhaps $8 an hour or $45 night. It is not easy to book ahead. One sometimes must simply show up. Perfect for miserly walkers.
Romance is round? A rural love motel in central South Korea.
Paul Salopek
According to Scott Diffrient, a professor of behavioral sciences at Colorado State University, the Korean love motel fills a “polymorphous space signifying the physical entanglements and spiritual bankruptcies behind South Korea’s modernization drive. Reserved for liaison between the sexes, the ubiquitous love motel is where upwardly mobile men and downhearted women enact gender-coded rituals in a space that is marginal yet central to the understanding of sexual mores in a patriarchal society.”
Put differently, they may have been invented as a front for prostitution. (Which is illegal in South Korea.) But their role has evolved. Today, most love motels provide a moderately acceptable and industrially rose-scented hutch where ordinary young Korean couples can enjoy fleeting privacy. That is: away from the family gaze.
A government study conducted in 2021 reveals that 62 percent of the unmarried population of South Korea between the ages of 20 and 44 still live at home with their parents. Unstable job markets and sky-high apartment costs drive this cramped housing trend. Hence, the vast demand for an intimate escape valve. Korea’s brand of capitalism-on-steroids has met this challenge by building love motels across the nation. How many? It is impossible to say. There are reputed to be hundreds of love motels operating in Seoul alone. You find them in bland city suburbs and dozy farming hamlets, near train stations, at national park entrances, and beside superhighways. Some tout Jacuzzis and private karaoke stages.
A tub made for two—if they take turns.
Paul Salopek
Sadly, our budget constrained Lee and me to low-frills pickings. Our fanciest stay featured a safari theme. Mosquito nets canopied the beds. Loneliness can be a terrible thing.
Spouse-proof doors. Some love motels had a high-security vibe. Others were Disney-esque.
Paul Salopek
“A husband once came looking for his wife here,” said the only woman love motel owner I ever met, at an isolated rest stop near the Kadong River. She was 78 with jet black hair and still sprightly, but her facility had seen better days. “He came driving here in a hurry, tipped off by a private detective. He wanted to break down the room door.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him to sit down first and think for a minute,” she said, wagging a stern finger. “I asked him, ‘Do you really want to do this?’ I told him he should go back home and forget what happened here forever.”
“And did he?”
“He did,” she said, nodding and grinning in triumph. “He did.”
Spouse-proof doors. Some love motels had a high-security vibe. Others were Disney-esque.
Paul Salopek
“A husband once came looking for his wife here,” said the only woman love motel owner I ever met, at an isolated rest stop near the Kadong River. She was 78 with jet black hair and still sprightly, but her facility had seen better days. “He came driving here in a hurry, tipped off by a private detective. He wanted to break down the room door.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him to sit down first and think for a minute,” she said, wagging a stern finger. “I asked him, ‘Do you really want to do this?’ I told him he should go back home and forget what happened here forever.”
“And did he?”
“He did,” she said, nodding and grinning in triumph. “He did.”
