Every few months, someone rediscovers the theory that K-dramas have ruined dating for an entire generation, and every few months, the conversation gets it slightly wrong. The usual argument goes, fiction sets impossible standards, women internalise them, real men suffer by comparison. It's a tidy story. It also lets everyone off the hook.

‘Lust Stories 3’ makes the more uncomfortable case. In Vikramaditya Motwane's segment, Radhika Apte and Konkona Sen Sharma play women who use their K-drama obsession as a diagnostic tool, a way of finally naming what their marriages have been missing for years. The genre isn't corrupting their expectations. It's exposing how low those expectations had already been allowed to sink.

Also Read: Interview: Sana Thampi on ‘Lust Stories 3’, and why she isn't apologising

The fantasy was never the fantasy

It's worth being honest about what a K-drama lead actually does. He notices, remembers a detail from seven episodes ago, clocks the gap between ‘I'm fine’ and actually fine. None of this requires wealth, a jawline, or a Seoul postcode, it requires attention, which is precisely the thing modern dating has stopped budgeting for.

Somewhere along the way, bare-minimum attentiveness got reclassified as a fictional luxury. A man who texts back within the day is ‘different.’ A man who remembers your coffee order is ‘such a catch.’ The bar didn't rise because of television. It fell everywhere else, and television simply kept the receipts.

Who actually benefits from this story

This is the part that rarely gets said aloud, the ‘K-dramas ruined my standards’ narrative is convenient for the people who benefit from women expecting less.

It reframes a structural problem, the uneven distribution of emotional labour in heterosexual relationships as a personal delusion, one brought on by too much fiction and not enough realism.

Women aren't disappointed because they've been misled by scriptwriters. They're disappointed because they've been shown, however exaggeratedly, what effort actually looks like, and can no longer unsee its absence.

Also Read: Everyone's talking about ‘Lust Stories 3,’ but is the hype deserved?

‘Lust Stories 3’ doesn't ask its women to give up on Seoul-sized fantasies. It asks, what does it say about real relationships that basic decency now reads like fiction? That isn't a case for lowering the bar back down. It's a case for asking who benefited from it being lowered in the first place.