avoidant attachment final boss
this exchange literally shows a push-pull dynamic. maomao responds in a guarded, deflective way. she doesn’t engage emotionally!!!!! instead uses logic or defensiveness
“love is an illness to a woman with goals” — tell me this doesn’t have maomao written all over it.
of course she has a distorted perception of love. how could she, when she was raised in a brothel where love was something you sold? where “affection” was currency, and feelings were a performance? it was never about connection—it was about survival, manipulation, or profit. she didn’t grow up associating love with safety or comfort—she associated it with consequences. obsession. regret. loss.
her entire worldview is built on observation and detachment. she’s the girl who watches everyone else’s feelings, taking notes like, “hmm. fascinating. they’re ruining their lives.” and you know she thinks falling in love is the emotional equivalent of losing a game you didn’t want to play in the first place.
beautiful, sparkling, infuriating jinshi.
she’s so emotionally repressed that the second someone gets a little too close, she spirals into denial like it’s a full-time job.
he walks into her life all mysterious and full of secrets and somehow sees her for who she is. and that’s terrifying for someone like maomao. because once you let yourself believe that someone genuinely cares— not for what you can give them, not for what you represent, but you— then the walls start cracking.
she tries so hard to justify her way out of it by hyperfixating on his background— classic avoidant behavior: if you label it, if you intellectualize it, it can't hurt you, right?
because feelings don’t care.
she’s so used to rationalizing every emotion into dust. but love isn’t rational. and that’s the curse, right? the illness. because even the most logical girl in the world is still human. still capable of falling.
“you’ll never find some fine prince whose heart will never change.” “what does trust ever get you?” do you SEE???
maomao isn’t cold—she’s armored. because when you’re taught from the start that love is fleeting and dangerous, you don’t dream of being loved.
you dream of being untouchable.
and that’s what makes her eventual unraveling so devastating. because underneath all that detachment is someone who wants to believe. she just doesn’t know if she’s allowed to.
“this was a man who’d had everything in life, and yet sometimes he seemed to hunger for something that he struggled to satisfy.”
the worst kind of yearning is the one you can’t name. jinshi has power, beauty, status—literally everything—and yet none of it scratches the itch of being seen and understood. not admired. not desired. just… understood.
“why can’t he pick someone else?”
you feel it? this is not just rhetorical. this is genuine confusion. it’s someone who doesn’t believe they’re worthy of being chosen, let alone by someone like him. this is peak avoidant attachment monologue—“why are you trying to love me when i’m not even open to being loved?”
“why did he need to go out of his way to pick a creature who lacked precisely that desire”
oh maomao. she is downplaying her own desirability, and more importantly, her capacity for emotional connection. this is her deep-rooted belief that she is inherently unlovable in that way. that she is wired wrong. that she lacks the softness, the openness, the desire that makes love possible. this shows her low sense of self-worth. she doesn’t just question why him—she questions why her. because everything in her upbringing told her that love is dangerous, fragile, and ultimately doomed. and jinshi’s attention? it threatens the emotional equilibrium she’s spent her whole life maintaining.
i think all this scene shows is how much maomao thinks she's not enough for jinshi.
maomao is not really afraid of love. she’s afraid of failing at it.
she grew up teaching herself how to survive, not how to feel. she closed herself off from everything: affection, anger, grief, even joy. emotions were messy, unpredictable, dangerous. no one ever showed her how to hold them, let alone return them.
she tells herself—“he’s too important. his status, his position... i can’t get involved. it’s political. it’s dangerous.”
and sure, it is complicated. but i believe that’s not really why she’s pulling away. not deep down.
i feel like that excuse is like an armor. a shield made of logic and detachment. because it’s easier to say “it’s impossible” than to admit: “i’m scared.”
maomao doesn’t reject love because she’s cold. she rejects it because love is chaos. and chaos is something she’s spent her whole life trying to control.
“once you know it, it’s hell.” “to know it was exactly why they went there.”
of course that’s what the courtesans say. because they’re the ones who see what love does to people—the way it consumes, obsesses, betrays. they don’t get fairy tale endings. they get men who fall in love and then leave. men who promise and then forget. they know what it means to be wanted and still be treated like you're disposable. for them, love might bring emotional entanglement, pain, or complications that outweigh any joy.
but the men? they want to know it. they chase it. romanticize it. destroy themselves for it. they actively sought this experience. for them, the pursuit of love or deep emotional connection was the goal, even if it ended in pain.
“that word, that simple four-letter word...”
this passage explores the paradox of love.
how it ruins people yet keeps them alive. how it’s a curse and a longing all at once.
and yet its also something many people long for and cannot live without it
all of this which she realized when jinshi’s eyes watched her intently. she literally looks into his eyes and think about love. IT COULD NOT HAVE BEEN CLEARER ????
she KNEW. that’s why she panics and proceeds to yap about lishu being a safe choice as his bride. and that’s exactly why in first place, she pushes the idea, the possibility, and the feelings away. because!!!! emotions are things she can’t calculate. they can’t be dissected or controlled. that’s why she pushes it away.
BUT the fact that she wishes for her relationship with jinshi to remain professional only proves that’s she’s already attached. she doesn’t want to lose him, and keeping this as they are feels safer.
“was it selfish of her to wish he would just act normal, not let the events of the previous night CHANGE how he TREATED her?”
she’s scared that the relationship she built with jinshi— this professional, distant, safe relationship— won’t survive if their feelings enter the equation.
“she wanted her relationship with him to be professional... that was what would be best for maomao at this moment.”
that’s the coping mechanism. maomao chooses the safety of professional distance over exploring intimacy. avoidant ppl often feel uncomfortable with emotional closeness and instead emphasize independence or rational justifications to maintain distance. that’s her trying to grip tightly to what they have, because any deviation— toward love, desire, real vulnerability— could ruin it all. and keeping things in that transactional space is the only way she knows how to protect both him and herself.
overall, its not that she doesn’t like him.
that’s the whole problem.
maomao just doesn’t want to get involved. not because she’s cold. but because involvement means vulnerability, consequences, mess. and worse—it might make things harder for jinshi. because she knows what jinshi’s position means. she knows the weight he carries. she doesn’t want to be the reason he stumbles.
what we need to pay attention to her is her actions rather than her thoughts. she cares for him, she worries about his well-being, she notices when he's tense, nervous, when he's overworking himself. she likes when he's himself, so she relaxes around him, too. she feels safe with him and compares him to loumen, the only other person she really cares about.
maomao may not say the words, but she’s already chosen him. she just doesn’t know how to live with that choice yet.
ANYWAAAYY she rlly radiates such strongly avoidant attachment behavior. she values control, logic, and emotional distance. not because she doesn’t feel, but because feeling is dangerous. vulnerability is chaos. and maomao? she’s survived her whole life by avoiding chaos.
“love is an illness to a woman with goals.” NO. unless, not in her case.
love doesn’t ruin maomao’s ambitions because jinshi never asks her to dim herself.
and love doesn’t ruin her ambitions because it just makes her question what her life is for beyond survival.
“i want you just as you are, even if that means you’ll walk away from me someday.” i feel like this is something jinshi would be saying :)
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