Apart from the obvious eye-candy (I could stare at Song Wei Long for days), I was overall quite disappointed in this drama. It suffered from poor character development and contrived plot, which made me both addicted and frustrated at the same time.

I wanted this show to be a mature romantic journey of growth, where two people who are inexperienced in their own ways find a balance in one other and get through societal pressures together. What I got instead was naïve main characters avoiding their problems and making poor life decisions, as well as frustrating secondary characters behaving very immaturely.

As an age-gap romance, the show had potential to explore some interested topics like going against social norms, workplace power dynamics, parental pressures and different types of marriages. These could have been interesting ways to keep our couple apart, however, these were only mentioned at a surface level and the potential was wasted.

Instead, the main source of conflict came from third-parties that manipulate our main characters or cause misunderstandings. The couples own insecurities lead them to run away from each-other or refuse to communicate their feelings. I'm not a fan of these kinds of reasons to keep the main couple apart, and kept watching in the hopes that they would learn from their repeated mistakes.

Unfortunately I don't feel like this happened, and didn't see much character growth or many people "finding themselves". In fact, I felt that several characters went backwards and became less confident or made worse decisions as the show went on. More emphasis was put on finding someone to love, than finding out who you really are, so that was a disappointing message.

I also disliked that the show glorified problematic behaviour, like the second-male-lead Lu Ming and his manipulation tactics, and that Fan Xing was okay with it. For the love of pasta, please don't take any relationship advice from any of these characters.

The only saving grace is Song Wei Long and his perfected "I find you cute, and I'm trying not to smile about it" look that he does so well. Unfortunately, there isn't as much interaction with the main couple as you would expect, which made me question why they even liked each other. The main characters have more screen time with secondary characters than with each other.

If you are looking for a sweet romance or mature journey of self-discovery then I think you will be disappointed on both fronts. You might enjoy this if you are a fan of Song Wei Long or any of the actors, however expect to be skipping a lot of scenes to get through the unnecessary number of episodes.