Shocking and candid—actor Goo Hye-sun opened up about why she’s taking a break from dating and the frightening reality of living with severe food allergies.
On a recent episode of the MBN variety show Kim Ju-ha's Day and Night, Goo Hye-sun appeared as a guest, speaking as both an actor and an entrepreneur.
Asked if she feels lonely, Goo replied, "I haven’t really felt loneliness since I was young." She added, "People ask if I get bored being alone in my room, but I don’t."
When asked whether she’s dating, she answered right away: "I’m not." Goo Hye-sun admitted, "Sometimes I date, sometimes I don’t—but when you’re in a relationship, you have to read the room and adjust yourself, and that’s exhausting."
When host Kim Ju-ha said, "I’m against marriage but for dating. If you don’t, you’ll just keep not doing it," Goo shared her take: "I think each person should go back to their own home." She continued, "I’m natural when I’m alone, but when someone else is around, I feel like I have to hide parts of myself," adding, "Living together means fully revealing and facing who I am."
Goo described it this way: "It feels like living with a mirror at home. I keep having to look at the parts of myself I don’t like," noting, "It feels hard to grab even a moment entirely to myself."
When Kim asked, "What if there’s someone who can love even those sides of you?" Goo drew a clear line: "I think I’m the only person who can do that for me." Kim agreed, saying, "There’s no one like me on this planet either."
Goo also recalled the health issues that once took a serious toll. "I have food allergies," she said. "Testing showed I reacted to almost everything."
She revealed she had even collapsed on set due to anaphylaxis. "It happened a couple of times. I fainted in a public restroom, and a sanitation worker found me because some of my hair was sticking out under the door."
She opened up about how restrictive eating used to be. "People live to eat, so I thought, ‘I can’t keep living like this,’" she said. "When I imagined what I’d want to eat before I die, gejang (soy-marinated raw crab) came to mind so badly."
Although she was severely allergic to shellfish, she once prepared antihistamines and an epinephrine auto-injector just in case—and ate the gejang. "I honestly thought, ‘If I die, I die.’ But strangely, I had no symptoms, and after that, I was able to eat it fine," she explained.
Meanwhile, Goo Hye-sun married actor Ahn Jae-hyun in 2016 and divorced in 2020.