Sidneylandsam

I discovered Qin Lan in THE RATIONAL LIFE, so I was excited to see her in a new project, especially since I’m not really fond of big age gap romances. I had also heard a lot about Wallace Chung, but somehow this is actually my first time watching him.
First of all, Qin Lan’s haircut is so nice!!! It suits her so well. Honestly, this might be my favourite look of hers. About Wallace… there’s such a softness and grace in his interpretation of Feng Rui!!!!!! He makes Feng Rui effortlessly elegant 🥹 I love how he handles Le and Si Ting. That alone tells you how much I loved his performance here.

One of the things that struck me the most was how different Feng Rui was with his almost girlfriend / future wife Pei Yan compared to how he was with Si Ting.

But let’s start with Pei Yan, because I truly liked her character. She’s like so many women in real life: invested. She wanted to be with Feng Rui and fully owned the attraction she felt toward him, so she went all in. She took care of him, his family, everything orbiting around him, and honestly that part felt completely normal to me. When you love, you don’t count. Where I started to disagree was that she was giving everything and receiving almost nothing in return except politeness and gratitude.

Pei Yan wasn’t just being kind. She was investing emotional labor through her time, her care, her presence. She offered loyalty that hadn’t been earned yet, quietly trying to prove that she belonged. I kept thinking to myself: Pei Yan is genuinely sweet and grounded, even balanced, but can’t she see that man is absolutely not into her?????????????????

He answered “OKAY” when she suggested they date.
That “okay” was CRIMINAL.
Sir accepted like it was a calendar invite.

Maybe it’s because I’m very transactional, but if I feel my commitment isn’t reciprocated, I’m out immediately. And the story actually agrees with that. The narrative doesn’t reward Pei Yan for over giving. If anything, it highlights a painful truth: being good doesn’t create love, availability doesn’t generate desire, and unreciprocated devotion eventually collapses. If I were in her place, I would have simply said: “I care, but I’m stepping back until there’s clarity and commitment.”

At some point, I also asked myself why Si Ting kept accompanying Pei Yan during her wedding preparations. It felt so strange. And Pei Yan bringing a complete stranger into something so intimate made absolutely no sense. But then it clicked: Pei Yan didn’t truly know where she stood with Feng Rui, so she confused shared activity with legitimacy. On some level, she also recognized Si Ting as a threat she wanted to monitor. Keeping her close became a way to reassure herself, to perform confidence. “See? I’m the bride. I’m secure.” But confidence that needs witnesses isn’t real security.

Pei Yan eventually stopped gaslighting herself and read the neon writing on the wall. Marrying him would have been self betrayal in a wedding dress. When she preempted the breakup, it wasn’t weakness, it was self rescue. She stopped waiting for him to magically choose her and said out loud the truth he was reluctant to admit. The silver lining is that even though she lost the relationship, she won herself back. She left before love curdled into resentment.

Coming back to Feng Rui, I love how every nonchalant guy suddenly becomes CHALANT the minute he meets the love of his life. Feng Rui improvising a “business trip” just to follow Si Ting in her dad quest 😁 He looks like a completely different person with her, alive, turned on. It’s cute. Anyone with eyes can see it. The fact that the entire family keeps forcing him to break them apart because of a memory of an uncle Si Ting had nothing to do with is incredibly selfish and cruel.

And then there’s Gao Hui. At some point, I genuinely wondered whether she even had a place of her own, because she’s constantly in other people’s houses and business, especially Feng Rui’s. Truth be told, control requires proximity. Gao Hui isn’t a casual drop in. She inserts herself to monitor conversations, interrupt intimacy, and steer decisions in real time. Feng Rui’s home becomes her command center, a space she treats as an extension of herself rather than his. She disguises occupation as help, never asking for consent or privacy, always arriving with unsolicited plans and solutions. And she inserts herself most aggressively around women, Si Ting, Pei Yan, anyone close to Feng Rui, positioning herself as the reasonable one while actively creating the mess.

On top of that, something that REALLY annoys me is how nobody is ever held accountable, and how Feng Rui, by never confronting his family, actively enables them to keep harming both him and the people he loves. After everything that happens, he still never truly stands up to them. He never draws a line. Instead, he repeatedly chooses to sacrifice the life he could build elsewhere with Si Ting and Le just to take care of a woman who has shown time and time again that she would stop at nothing to hurt Si Ting.

The family is never blamed. Secrets keep coming out, each one nastier than the last, yet there are no real consequences. Even after his mother took Le without his consent, Feng Rui still allows access, still compromises, still avoids confrontation. His father, Feng Ming, is no better. The grandfather is just as complicit. Add the jealous best friend and this should have been a breaking point long ago. Instead, it is treated as just another unfortunate detail, and I genuinely do not understand why none of this ever leads to real accountability.