Echo used to date men. When the software developer turned 30, she started feeling pressure from her friends to get married and have kids – a rite of passage, they deemed, for any ordinary Korean woman. After Echo agreed to tie the knot a couple of years later with the man she was seeing, she couldn't shake the feeling she had buckled under the weight of expectation and long-held traditions of duty in South Korea. “My mom often reminded me to dress up from head to toe and wear thick make-up, even when I went to a local corner shop,” she recalls. “Just because I am a woman.”
In the lead-up to her wedding, Echo never felt comfortable sharing these feelings with friends and family, and in 2020 she began searching for young women like her online. According to a report by the Korea Citation Index, that year half of all Korean women in their 20s
