No romance allowed: Korea's hobby clubs embrace 'no dating' rules

When Jung's running crew sat down to write its rules, one of them had nothing to do with running.

"We added the no-dating line after our second year, because we kept losing good runners to other people's breakups," said Jung, who helps lead a 22-member crew in eastern Seoul. "It sounds cold, but the rule is there to protect the group, not to police anyone's love life."

Jung's crew is far from alone. The clause appears across Korean group life: university circles, hobby societies, book clubs and lately the running crews multiplying across Seoul. These groups, known in Korean as donghohoe, bring together people who share an interest, whether running, hiking, books or wine, to meet regularly for the activity and the socializing that grows around it.

Hiking clubs carry the heaviest reputation, and in online advice forums Koreans earnestly debate whether to "allow" a partner to join one, on the assumption that the trailhead is a gateway to affairs. The suspicion runs deep enough to have its own online shorthand: warnings to steer clear of anyone too embedded in a club, on the theory that they are there to cycle through partners rather than to exercise.

The joke writes itself, which is why "SNL Korea" (2011-) keeps coming back to it. In a recurring sketch titled "The Purpose of the Club" (translated), a running crew gathers ostensibly to jog, then spends most of its energy on flirtation, jealousy and romantic intrigue. A later installment moves the chaos to a hiking club, where middle-aged members trade not-so-subtle advances. The bit lands because audiences instantly recognize the type.

So why would a group built to help strangers bond explicitly forbid the most natural form of bonding?

A rule written for survival

Part of the answer is the plain arithmetic of survival. A couple that forms inside a club tends to fold inward, and a couple that breaks up can take the group down with it.

"There were maybe 15 of us, and when [the couple] split, we suddenly had to pick a side just by choosing which dinner to show up to," said Lee, who left a Seoul badminton club last year. "Within a couple of months the club basically didn't exist."

The damage does not wait for a breakup, or even for a couple. The flirting that comes first breeds misunderstandings between members, all jockeying and misread signals, and it can curdle into the cliquish in-group socializing Koreans disparage as chinmokjil, souring a club long before anyone has paired off.

Kim Soo-han, a sociology professor at Korea University who studies organizations, frames the clause as a tool of continuity.

“A club is essentially a set of rules meant to keep the gathering stable, and a romance gone wrong is the fastest way to lose two members at once and split the rest into camps,” said Prof. Kim. He points to alumni circles undone by a single divorce: Afterward, whoever shows up decides who stays home.

More than housekeeping

But breakups happen everywhere, and most cultures do not respond by banning romance. The sharper question is why Korea reaches for a written rule, and here the explanation shades from logistics into culture.  

A club is meant to be a single warm collective, not a grid of private pairings. A romance carves an exclusive two-person world out of that collective, and Korean couples tend to make the world conspicuous, sitting together, eating together, signaling unmistakably that they are now a unit. That display, easy to read and hard to ignore, is exactly what a many-to-many group runs against.

There is also a habit of expecting a person to belong wholly to whatever role they occupy at the moment: worker at work, family member at home, club member at the club, and a matching discomfort with blurred boundaries.

Rather than permit romance within limits, the reflex is to wall it off entirely. The same instinct surfaces in the no-dating clauses long rumored to govern K-pop idols, whose fans decline to grant them a private life at all.

Why not the office?

If the impulse is cultural, though, why do workplaces, where Koreans spend far more of their lives, rarely ban romance outright?

Prof. Kim's answer is practical. A company legally could not, since barring staff from dating or marrying would run afoul of labor law. And it does not need to, because a workplace already supplies hierarchy, evaluations and thick norms that quietly regulate behavior, which is also why office romance gets hidden rather than forbidden. A hobby club has none of that scaffolding: no boss, no ranks, no formal way to discipline anyone.

“So [a club] improvises an informal rule of its own,” said Kim. “Organizers eager to grow the group have every reason to target the single biggest threat to its survival."

None of which makes the rule literal. No club can actually stop two people from falling for each other. What the clause really asks is that they not be so absorbed in each other that they wreck it for everyone else. Korea is unusual mainly in writing the rule down.

Not everyone accepts the logic

"They tell us to go meet people the old-fashioned way, and then the one place full of people who share your hobby puts up a sign saying 'don't,'" said Seo Eun-jin, who is engaged to her boyfriend whom she met in a college film club that frowned upon it. "We just kept it quiet for a year. Half the club is secretly seeing someone anyway."

That tension carries a real cost. If clubs, the obvious home for the "natural meeting," or jaman-chu, that Koreans say they prefer, fence off romance, singles get pushed toward dating apps that flatten people into salary, height and looks. Ban courtship in the warm place, and more of it migrates to the cold one.

Which is why the clause is worth taking seriously rather than mocking. Clubs are not a frivolity but social infrastructure. Kim's own research found that assigned mentoring and networking schemes rarely take, while a casual football or painting club mixes people across rank, age and gender effortlessly.

Kim reaches back to Alexis de Tocqueville, who traced the vitality of early U.S. democracy to its thick layer of voluntary associations, and argues that Korea needs more such clubs, not fewer. The awkward little ban on dating is the price a fragile, leaderless group is willing to pay to keep existing, so that everything else a club is for can survive.

BY KIM MIN-YOUNG [[email protected]]