Why K-pop stars keep relationships hidden

A K-pop star has been accused of "betrayal" after fans discovered she had a boyfriend.

When followers of Karina found out she was dating Lee Jae-wook, an actor, they drove an electronic billboard mounted to a vehicle to her management agency in protest and asked the singer why "the love given to you by your fans" was not enough.

The 23-year-old member of the group Aespa was forced to issue a "grovelling apology", said The Telegraph, in which she said sorry to fans for "surprising you greatly" and promised to show a "more mature and hardworking side" in the future.

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It was emblematic of a genre where fans can be "overwhelmingly hateful" and "downright abusive" to anyone they feel threatens their bond with the artist, said the Daily Mail. So if an idol is linked with a "vaguely romantic interest", they "may receive a barrage of hate mail, comments on their appearance and threats to their life".

'Bad for business'

Karina's is "not an isolated incident" because pop stars in South Korea and Japan work in "notoriously pressurising industries", where such personal revelations can be "tricky to navigate", said the BBC.

"Just a decade ago, it was common practice for K-pop agencies to ban new stars from dating or even having a personal mobile phone, and even now admissions of romantic relationships are often considered scandalous to fans."

The "intensely competitive" K-pop industry is worth an estimated £8 billion annually to the South Korean economy, said The Telegraph, and its stars have been "bound by contracts" that have “no dating” rules. They cannot get married without permission.

The driving factor behind these regulations is that industry managers want fans to believe they could have a relationship with the stars. When the Blackpink lead vocalist Jisoo's relationship with actor Ahn Bo-hyun was revealed, sociologist Patrick Williams of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore told the BBC that K-pop stars being in relationships may be "bad for business" because they "want to sell idols that appear to be, at least in an imaginary sense, romantically obtainable".

Although in "many places around the world", the announcement that a young pop star and an actor have become an item would be "little more than a quick celebrity headline", said CNN, in South Korea and Japan, it can "still be taboo" in a culture where record labels like to "promote the fantasy" of "unhitched" celebrities.

Signs of change

There have been "signs of change in recent years", said CNN, "with agencies shifting away from controversial contract terms". Fans have "begun urging each other to allow stars more privacy" and the "ability to live their lives", added the broadcaster, noting that under Karina's apology post, the comment section was "flooded with fans rallying in support".

And although the situation in the K-pop world is particularly extreme, fan discomfort over their pop heroes dating is not confined to the genre. Boy bands from the 1990s such as Take That and East 17 were discouraged from having relationships. Last year, Take That member Howard Donald told the Take That: This Life podcast that he had hid his girlfriend under a blanket during the band's heyday, said The Sun.

In 2015, One Direction fans told a woman linked to band member Niall Horan that they would "find her and kill her", said The Sydney Morning Herald. That came a few years after the late Caroline Flack said that she had received death threats after she was romantically linked with band member Harry Styles.

The intense bond between pop stars and their fans is universal. "When your crush is single, it's amazing because you feel like you still have a chance no matter how unlikely that is," wrote Jasmine Gomez for Seventeen. But "when they start dating someone new, a little something dies inside of you".