I had high hopes for this one but despite an engaging start it kind of petered out and I started to get bored in the final stretch. Others have already mentioned the use of cliche tropes, which was clearly intentional and not necessarily a bad thing when deployed well. But in this show I don’t think they pulled it off.

The drama started strong, with the past timeline with the teen versions of the characters a particular bright spot. I found their story utterly charming and the actors were great.

Unfortunately the adult story line was a mess, despite strong performances. The pacing was off, with plot points dragged out unreasonably long and side stories that added little to the main narrative. There were multiple points in the story when I didn’t understand why the leads were behaving a certain way - and it was clear that the only real answer was the plot demanded it. Worst of all, despite being about 3 hours longer than it should have been, the show didn’t even provide satisfying resolutions to many of the conflicts and questions it introduced (I felt this most keenly wrt the FL’s mother, who was never taken to account for her interference that resulted in years of misery for everyone involved). And the choice to drag out the reunion until the last 15 minutes of the final episode meant we saw precious little of our couple actually together.

Lastly, I’ll just say that I thought the overall tone of the drama was a mismatch for the story. The main narrative was about a couple who were deeply in love losing 25 years together mostly because of outside interference, but the characters never seemed to get angry or feel any resentment about it. They were actually pretty chill most of the time despite the absolute tragedy of the story, and the tone of the whole drama was curiously light. A second pass on the script to tighten up the writing all around would have served this drama well.