paragraph from "Letter from a Birmingham Jail [Martin Luther King Jr.]" April 16, 1963

On November 9, HyunA and DAWN (Hyojong) made their first variety show appearance as a couple on JTBC’s “Ask Us Anything!”

HyunA was the first to appear on set and she said shyly, “I brought my boyfriend today,” making the cast members react in surprise. Once both HyunA and DAWN had been introduced, Min Kyung Hoon asked, “How long have you two been dating?”

DAWN said that it was almost four years (the two went public in 2018, but have been dating since 2016) and Min Kyung Hoon immediately followed up with, “Who approached the other first?”

HyunA said, “I… This kind of hurts my pride, but… I waited for a year and a half.” In response to Kim Heechul’s question, she confirmed that that was how long she’d had a one-sided crush on DAWN. “It wasn’t a ‘some’ relationship. There was nothing there at all. I was just in love by myself.”

She added, “He would always act in a way that was different from what I expected. For example, it had been months but he didn’t ask me for my phone number, even though we were together every day. When we spent time together, he would always keep distance between us. That started to bother me.”

Kang Ho Dong asked, “Wasn’t it obvious that you liked him?” and HyunA replied, “I made it obvious but he said he never noticed.”

Kim Heechul intercepted a question from Min Kyung Hoon and asked how she finally made her confession. She said, “I bought a bottle of soju and took it home. I took a photo of it to let him know that I’d been drinking. He replied, ‘Just a minute’ and it turned out that he’d gone out and bought a bottle too. So that we could drink together even though we were apart. He also told me to drink slowly because he knew I wasn’t good at drinking. That made my heart beat faster.”

She continued, “I said to him, ‘I have something I want to tell you. I’ve liked you for a long time and I tried to let you know, because we weren’t in a situation where I could confess to you first. But you’re really bad at noticing things. I’m getting the courage up to confess to you, so please wait for me.”

“But he was really direct about it,” she concluded. “He said, ‘Why? Can’t we just date now?’ I was so happy that I couldn’t stay still, but I was also a little sad. I’d waited for so long but it happened so easily, so it felt like a dream rather than reality.”

Linda Goodman’s Love Signs