It's a square-headed lion... Don't you think it's very similar to you? ... Shouldn't a lion have a full-head mane? But there is one lion, it was born with a square mane. Then from this difference, it is often stuck. Stuck in its own principle. Stuck in a struggle, thinking whether to compromise or not. Stuck in confusion, thinking what if the whole world was right and only my commitment was wrong.

I really, really loved In Time With You. I wasn't expecting to. I had really liked Ariel Lin in It Started with a Kiss and Lovesick, but I didn't love them. They make use of some romcom tropes that just aren't my thing. I wasn't expecting this to be any different. But this was.


Ostensibly, the series is a love story about two friends who are in love but never single at the same time, but I feel like the major focus is really the struggle within You Qing, to embrace who she is (loud, opinionated, controlling) or to conform to society's expectations -- much like the square-maned lion in the quote above. This becomes a theme in all her relationships, from her ex-boyfriend Henry telling her that no one will love her if she doesn't learn to control her temper, to the love triangle between her, Li Da Ren, and Ding Li Wei, her "cheating ex-boyfriend." Da Ren hates Li Wei, but it's not just because of jealous or even because Li Wei cheated on her You Qing. He hates Li Wei because You Qing became a different person while dating him -- someone passive and quiet, with no opinions of her own. When she starts dating Li Wei again, we see that process in action, how he slowly and carefully breaks down everything that makes her her, and then how she reclaims it.


In one of my screenwriting classes, we came up with a story about a girl dating this emotionally abusive asshole. He was domineering and controlling and awful. But not awful enough evidently, so we made him a cheater as well. Because sexual infidelity is the worst thing a man can do to a woman. It's been four years and I'm still pissed off about that. I think that's why You Qing and Li Wei's relationship fascinates me so much... because the story makes it very, very clear that Li Wei is terrible for her not because he's unfaithful, but because he's emotionally abusive. When trying to convince her to date him again, he consistently ignores her boundaries, pushing himself into her personal space, going behind her back to get her coworkers on his side. He reads her text messages and deletes a message from Li Da Ren, and then tries to convice her she's being unreasonable when she finds out and gets pissed off. He forces her to go to work parties of his, even if she's had a long day and is exhausted. When she tries to talk to him about negotiating and compromising, he treats her like she's being completely unreasonable. He tries to take control of every aspect of her life.

And yes, he is a cheater, but what I liked is that You Qing decided to break up with him before finding out that he was cheating. His infidelity wasn't the final straw for her; rather, she was going to him to call off their wedding, even though she had no "real" reason to do so and it would be a scandal, and her discovery of him in bed with another woman then gave her a socially acceptable reason to end things.


A lot of things about her relationship with Li Wei resonated with me, actually. When he first comes back into town and says he wants to start again, she says no, she doesn't want to. And he keeps pressuring and she keeps saying no and he keeps pressuring and finally she says "yes" even though she knows he's bad for her. Li Da Ren understandably gets pissed, because he hasn't been under that kind of pressure. Not the pressure from Li Wei, but from society overall. You Qing at that point had spent half the series basically being told she is fundamentally unloveable, and here is a man who says that he loves her. I've had friendships like that, where I've known the friendship is no good but I'm lonely and as bad as that friendship is, it fills a need, and my family has been like "...but it's BAD for you!" So I really understood how You Qing felt and why she did what she did. (Incidentally, this was also the point where I wanted to punch Li Da Ren in the face, because she had spent half the series telling him how unloveable she felt and he STILL didn't tell her "Hey, I love you." There is being shy, and there is being a coward, and he was a fucking coward. If he had been more supportive, she never would have gotten back together with Li Wei.)


Interesting character arcs and depictions of emotional abuse aside, there's a narrative compassion in the show that I see in very few series. Li Wei is awful, but he's not portrayed as a villain. Li Da Ren's girlfriend Maggie is at one point an obstacle, but she is portrayed very sympathetically. You Qing is friends not only with her ex-boyfriend Henry (who, despite that one awful quote in the first episode, is actually a good friend to her), but with his current girlfriend and the ex-girlfriend before her. Her assistant Nic breaks her heart, but she forgives him and they become friends. I loved that. I love how, in this show, people can hurt each other and then people can be forgiven. I love that Li Da Ren is You Qing's best friend, but he is by no means her only friend. He's not even her only guy friend. One of the tag lines in this series is "Can a man and a woman be just friends?" and I went into the show thinking that the answer would be "no" because obviously You Qing and Da Ren were endgame, but the answer was actually yes. Because while You Qing and Da Ren did end up getting together, both of them still had other friends of the opposite sex. That was a really pleasant surprise for me.

I loved the emphasis on friendship and community overall. A lot of romances focus only on the romantic relationship, and it's like "Wait, don't either of you have any other friends or family?" But we see both of their families; we see both of their friendships with other people. We see how they've both remained friendly with their old high school classmates. (Something which I'm a sucker for, probably because I'm terrible at keeping in touch with people and am therefore only in touch with one person from high school. Sob.)


All in all, In Time With You was not at all what I expected it to be. And it is now one of my favorite tv shows ever. Highly, highly, HIGHLY recommended.