Soyou Tells a Twenty-Something to Date More: 'I Still Regret Not Dating Enough in My Twenties'

Soyou's blunt answer to a familiar worry

Soyou, best known as a vocalist of the group SISTAR, has offered a piece of dating advice that cuts straight through the usual hedging. According to reporting by Koreaboo, the singer appeared in a YouTube video published on 19 October, titled "Wow, that's really bad.. Love Counseling Room: Dating Edition", in which she read out a letter sent in by a woman in her twenties and responded to it on camera.

The letter writer's problem was not dramatic. She explained that she had been living so busily that she never had the chance to look around her, and was therefore unsure whether now was the right moment to start dating at all. She also worried about the possibility of hurting someone if she began a relationship without a clear reason. It is the kind of circular worry that tends to sound reasonable from the inside and slightly absurd from the outside, and Soyou treated it accordingly.

Why the letter writer hesitated

The situation described in the letter will be recognisable to plenty of listeners, K-pop fans included. A packed schedule, a sense of falling behind on a timeline nobody quite agreed to, and a fear of doing a relationship badly enough to hurt someone are the standard ingredients of a very common impasse. The writer's reasoning had a certain logic to it: if she could not offer someone proper attention, perhaps the kinder choice was not to begin.

What the letter really described, though, was a decision being postponed indefinitely rather than made. Waiting for a period when life is calm and nothing is competing for attention is a wait that, for many people in their twenties, does not end on its own. Soyou's response was aimed directly at that assumption rather than at the specifics of the letter.

'There's always time for dating'

Soyou's reply was not gentle. She told the writer, in a line that loses nothing in translation, that babies are born even in times of war, then pushed back on the premise that busyness was the obstacle. She asked whether the writer thought she herself had not been busy in her twenties, confirmed that she had been, and then said simply that there is always time for dating.

The second half of her advice was warmer and more personal. She told the writer to start first, because things change once you do, and then volunteered her own experience: she still regrets not dating more in her twenties. Her reasoning was that the love available at that age is the freshest kind, and that even though a person is an adult, it is still cute. Her conclusion was to date as much as you can while you can.

Two things are doing the work here. One is the dismantling of the busyness excuse, which is easy to accept from someone whose own twenties were spent inside one of the most demanding schedules in the Korean music industry. The other is the framing of regret. Soyou did not present dating as a project to be optimised or a box to be ticked before a deadline; she presented the absence of it as something a person might look back on with a sense of loss.

Regret, offered as data rather than instruction

There is a difference between an idol telling fans what to do and an idol describing what she wishes she had done. Soyou's comments sit closer to the second category. She was not issuing a directive about how anyone should live, but using her own hindsight to answer a question someone else had asked. That framing matters, because it keeps the advice on the level of shared experience rather than prescription.

It also avoids the trap of treating relationships as a measure of a life well spent. The regret she described is specific and modest: not that she failed to find a great love, but that she did not date enough of the ordinary, unremarkable variety when the conditions for it were easiest. Her observation that even adult love is still cute is a reminder that the stakes of dating are usually much lower than the letter writer imagined.

Nobody is asking anyone to be finished, polished or fully available before they are allowed to be interested in someone.

A candid register from second-generation idols

Comments like these fit a broader pattern in which idols of Soyou's generation have become more willing to speak plainly about ordinary adult life on YouTube shows and similar formats. SISTAR's Bora described how a relationship went from a casual afternoon message to a two-hour breakup call in a previous K-Beats story, and Lee Jooyeon said she went on many dates during her After School days, explaining that the Han River was a popular spot because there were few other places to go.

In each case the appeal is the same: specific, unglamorous detail rather than a managed public image.

For fans, that shift is part of why these clips travel. A letter read aloud on camera and answered directly is a simple format, but it puts an artist in the position of responding rather than performing, and it lets audiences hear a working musician think out loud about something that has nothing to do with a release schedule. The subject is dating, but the underlying appeal is candour about a decade of life that most idols spend largely inside a company timetable.

What the exchange says about time and timing

The practical question underneath the letter is one that many people in demanding jobs face, and idol schedules make it unusually stark. Trainee and debut years are structured around practices, recordings, promotions and travel, and the early twenties that most people spend learning how to be in relationships can pass in a blur of shared dormitories and group itineraries. By the time an artist reaches their late twenties, the sense of having missed a stretch of ordinary experience can be genuine rather than performative.

Soyou's answer sidesteps that structural problem by refusing to treat it as decisive. Her point is not that busy people have endless free time, but that the decision to begin is usually available before the conditions feel ideal, and that waiting for ideal conditions is how the decision gets postponed. That is a useful distinction for anyone who has convinced themselves that a relationship requires a cleared diary and a settled mind before it can be attempted.

It is worth being careful here. Nothing in the exchange suggests that dating is compulsory, or that a person who chooses otherwise is making a mistake. Soyou was answering a specific letter from someone who wanted to date and could not work out when to start. The advice applies to that person, and to anyone who recognises the same hesitation, rather than to everyone in their twenties by default.

The takeaway

The clip is short, and its value is in the plainness of the answer. A woman in her twenties asked whether there was time, and a singer who spent her own twenties working answered that there is, that the start is the hard part, and that the regret of not beginning tends to outlast the inconvenience of beginning badly. It is advice delivered from hindsight rather than from authority, which is why it lands.

It also gives fans a different kind of access than a comeback interview would: a pop vocalist thinking about something ordinary and speaking about it without a script. Those moments are often the ones that stay with an audience longer than a promotional clip, precisely because there is nothing to promote.

Koreaboo's original reporting on the video is the source for the details above. The exchange is a small one, but it raises a question many listeners will have argued about in their own lives, and it is the kind of ordinary reflection that makes a public figure feel less remote.