30-sec preview
2019 · From the album SAILING
How can I love the heartbreak, you're the one I love
by AKMU
The reading
A refusal to romanticize a breakup, sung by someone who realizes mid-walk that loving you cannot include loving the loss of you
02 · Interpretation
AKMU's case against the beautiful breakup
Most breakup ballads accept the premise that two people can love each other and still have to part. AKMU's 2019 single, from the album SAILING, refuses that premise out loud. The Korean title translates roughly as "How could I love even the parting; it's you I love," and the song is essentially a five-minute argument against the idea that loss can be folded into devotion.
The scene is small and physical. The narrator deliberately falls a few steps behind her partner to watch what he looks like walking alone. The seat beside him is empty; the street has gone monochrome; he turns to look back. From that single image she draws her conclusion: she cannot leave him. Any hardship between them, she decides, is easier to bear than this.
The thesis, stated plainly
The chorus is unusually direct for a Korean ballad. She asks how she could possibly love the breakup itself, then answers her own question: what she loves is him. To give each other up in the name of love, she says, would tear her apart, and she will not do it. The rhetorical move is important. The song isn't pleading for reconciliation or mourning a fait accompli; it is dismantling a logic. The logic being dismantled is the familiar one where two people decide their love is too painful or too complicated to continue, and frame the ending as a final act of care. She calls that bluff.
The second verse: walking it back
In the second verse the narrator considers taking the long way home, doubling back two or three times to delay the moment of separation. The road is described as thick with silence; they walk in step without speaking. The phrase 주마등, the lantern-image associated in Korean with a life flashing before one's eyes at the moment of death, lights a distant point on the road. The comparison is pointed: walking toward this breakup feels like walking toward dying. With each step closer to parting, she feels the hand she's holding disappearing. The body is registering what the mind is still trying to talk itself into.
The bridge and the sea
The final passage reframes what a breakup actually is. If they separated now, she says, the real ending would be the long wait for an ocean-deep love to dry up completely. That image does the heaviest work in the song. It admits that walking away is not the end of love but the start of a slow evaporation, possibly years long. Given that, the "clean" breakup is a fiction. There is no version of this that doesn't hurt for a long time, so the supposedly mature choice, parting now to spare future pain, simply relocates the pain rather than preventing it.
Why it landed
Lee Chanhyuk wrote the song, and his sister Lee Suhyun sings it alone, which matters. AKMU built their reputation on sibling harmonies, and the choice to strip one voice away enacts the song's subject: this is what the absence sounds like. The arrangement stays restrained, piano-forward, letting the vocal carry the argument. It became one of the most-streamed Korean ballads of its year and a karaoke standard, partly because it gave listeners a sentiment they hadn't quite heard articulated: not "I miss you" or "I was wrong," but "the premise of our breakup is incorrect."
The song endures because it treats its listener as an adult. It doesn't wallow, doesn't beg, doesn't promise change. It simply notices, mid-walk, that the story being told about this relationship doesn't hold up, and says so before the next step lands.
Themes catalogued
03 · Lyrics
"How can I love the heartbreak, you're the one I love"
일부러 몇 발자국 물러나
내가 없이 혼자 걷는 널 바라본다
옆자리 허전한 너의 풍경
흑백 거리 가운데 넌 뒤돌아본다
그때 알게 되었어
난 널 떠날 수 없단 걸
우리 사이에 그 어떤 힘든 일도
이별보단 버틸 수 있는 것들이었죠
어떻게 이별까지 사랑하겠어
널 사랑하는 거지
사랑이라는 이유로 서로를 포기하고
찢어질 것같이 아파할 수 없어 난
두세 번 더 길을 돌아갈까
적막 짙은 도로 위에 걸음을 포갠다
아무 말 없는 대화 나누며
주마등이 길을 비춘 먼 곳을 본다
그때 알게 되었어
난 더 갈 수 없단 걸
한 발 한 발 이별에 가까워질수록
너와 맞잡은 손이 사라지는 것 같죠
어떻게 이별까지 사랑하겠어
널 사랑하는 거지 oh
사랑이라는 이유로 서로를 포기하고
찢어질 것같이 아파할 수 없어 난
No woah oh
어떻게 내가 어떻게 너를
이후에 우리 바다처럼 깊은 사랑이
다 마를 때까지 기다리는 게 이별일 텐데
어떻게 내가 어떻게 너를
이후에 우리 바다처럼 깊은 사랑이
다 마를 때까지 기다리는 게 이별일 텐데
Lyrics via Google. Copyright belongs to rights holders.
04 · FAQ
Frequently asked
What does the title 'How can I love the heartbreak, you're the one I love' actually mean?
What is the walking scene at the start of the AKMU song about?
What does the ocean image in the final verse mean?
Who wrote 'How can I love the heartbreak' and who sings it?
Why was this song such a big hit in Korea in 2019?
Is the song asking for reconciliation or describing a breakup that already happened?
How does this song compare to other AKMU ballads?
05 · Discography
