My resolution at the beginning of the year was to make sure I only watched dramas I was feeling, as opposed to being bullied or intimidated into watching. So, when I first picked up this drama, the first episodes were so boring that I had to drop it.

But then my sister started watching it, so I decided to join her, and in a few episodes, I was sucked in, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because I’m the kind of chill person who is very okay with admitting when I am wrong.

Did my opinion about this drama change? To be honest, when I started watching again, I didn’t have high expectations for it, and it ended up being exactly what I thought it would be, so I wasn’t disappointed, and I wasn’t shocked in any way.

It’s a little odd when you finish watching a drama with a character who you loved together with their female lead in one drama and then see them with another character in another drama, but I braved it like the adult I am and only felt a little uncomfortable.

Our male lead, Wei Zhe Ming, is a character I would go to the ends of the Earth for, so I wasn’t surprised I picked this up, even though I just finished watching Only For Love, where he played the role of a professor who falls in love with his best friend’s niece.

I loved him so much in that drama, but I actually started watching this one before that drama, and I dropped this one. So, when I finished watching Only For Love I came back to this one.

Anyway, if you’re part of the late gang like I am and you’d like to know if this drama is worth the time you’d invest in it, stick around because I’m going to tell you everything I loved and hated about this drama.

What is I May Love You about?

Our female lead, Tang Xin played by Huang Ri Ying, is a screenwriter and an author who has had a crush on the CEO of her company, Tang Yu, for the longest period, but then her efforts to approach him are frustrated when he begs her to help him seduce her best friend.

Not willing to let go of this opportunity to get closer to him, she pretends to help him knowing fully well that her best friend doesn’t have any kind of feelings for him. Her best friend eventually gets married, and Tang Yu is disappointed but not heartbroken and moves on.

She then sees this as the perfect opportunity to strike, which she does, but is almost instantly rejected by him. After this, she decides to stop renewing her book with the production company and start chasing her own happiness.

It is after she finally leaves the company that Tang Yu starts spiralling and realizes that he might have feelings for her. When he approaches her to propose at least getting to know each other romantically, she refuses because she feels that the letdown was too brutal for her to recover from. He interprets this as her being fickle in love.

Since she doesn’t agree to date him, she leaves the company and refuses to work with him on her book any longer. He decides to take things into his own hands and starts aggressively pursuing her. Needless to say, over time, he breaks down the walls around her heart, and they fall in love with each other and live happily ever after.

My Review

First off, I know that the budget for dramas can be vastly different, and I don’t have a lot of expectations in this regard, especially when it comes to Chinese dramas, but the minimum should be that a supposed CEO actually dresses like a CEO. It was so annoying to see that our ML in this drama, Tang Yu, kept on repeating outfits so much that sometimes it made him look tacky.

Also See: 11 Swoony Enemies To Lovers Chinese Dramas That Set The Tone Right

This un-CEO-like behaviour is what made me dislike Dylan in Only For Love because he never really felt wealthy. In this drama, he literally has houses and cars, yet somehow he rotated four fugly suits, and I didn’t know what to make of this.

Moving on, like I said earlier, I wasn’t a fan of the storyline from the get-go. I always appreciate dramas where the girl falls first and does all she can to make the man have feelings for her, but in this case, Tang Xin not only fell for Tang Yu but essentially tricked him for the longest time.

Now, we aren’t shown all of this, and this is another complaint I have because it almost feels as if we start in the middle of the drama, but we don’t know that she lied to him about the effort she was making to convince her friend to date him. I’m not sure how they were able to just ignore that calculated deception.

And it was even more irritating to see the way she was eventually made to look like the victim while our ML was sent to the doghouse. FL literally had a wall of pictures of our ML that she had taken secretly, and that was creepy and not romantic in any way.

Related: 8 Romantic Chinese Dramas About Love At First Sight Full Of Swoons

No matter how I tried to understand what was happening in those first few episodes, the plot felt very icky. Why did she lie about her feelings for him? Why wasn’t he allowed to reject her without her being childish about it? A better drama with this trope that showed the growth after the ML finds out about the FL’s feelings is Cute Programmer.

Personally, I felt that the romance was nice but ultimately boring. A good part of the drama is basically our ML begging the FL to date him and accept his feelings and essentially being made to look like the bad guy who committed the greatest sin ever. Aside from this being very annoying, it went on for too long, and I was bored halfway through.

They do have amazing chemistry, but I simply did not like our FL. She was annoying, rude, and not very intelligent, which isn’t what we’re being told in the story. I know that humans make bad decisions time and time again, but for her, the decisions she made and the things she did didn’t make logical sense, and I just kept on wondering where the screenwriter was going with everything.

I watched this on the Mango TV YouTube channel, and you guys, the subtitles have to be the worst I have seen so far. I don’t speak Mandarin, but sometimes the subtitles were either totally absent or random English words were placed together that didn’t even make sense.

I know that doing subtitles isn’t the easiest task, but I do think there’s a minimum standard for things like this, and it affected my enjoyment and flow with the drama. So, you should know this if you’re thinking of watching it.

And I know I’ve focused too much on the negative aspects, but one positive that I appreciated about this drama was that there wasn’t a brother’s best friend romance in the drama. So, the way it usually goes is that the best friend of the brother almost always ends up with the brother’s younger sister, who has matured over the course of the drama.

Related: 12 Best Romantic Chinese Dramas With Cold-Hearted Male Leads You’ll Fall In Love With

Instead, in this case, while the sister, Tang Ding Ding, started off liking her brother’s best friend, Gao Heng, her brother was very against their relationship. But this wasn’t what prevented her from dating him. One day, she finally gathered the nerve to make her move, but she realized that the feelings she had for him were not romantic at all.

She ends up falling in love with another character (Lui Zhi Qing, the director), while the best friend also gets his act together and falls for another character (You Huan, the FL’s bestie). I loved the way it happened because it felt more natural. But I do wish that the character development of the sister in this drama had felt more natural, like how it did in Only for Love.

This might actually be the very first drama where the first two kisses between our primary couple were difficult to watch. I had to fast forward those areas, and it was only later on that I became comfortable. And this was because the two kisses were forced on the other person. Yes, the second time the other person responded, but those initial seconds of struggle were very uncomfortable.

Finally, I was disappointed by the lack of development in this drama, and I actually feel the script was very weak. The final episodes were fluff upon fluff, and in my opinion, we could have done without at least 15 episodes from this drama.

Conclusion

My honest truth is that I did not enjoy this drama for the reasons I stated above. I know that some other person might enjoy it, so maybe you might want to pick this up if you like a drama with extended grovelling where the girl falls first.

And if you would like to read my review of a drama that is sort of similar to this one, you should check out Cute Programmer, which I absolutely loved.

If you want more drama recommendations, here are some of the best dubbed Chinese dramas on YouTube you should watch this weekend, or you might want to check out any of these lovely romantic comedy C-dramas.

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