When people just... fit

Tang Yang (Wang Yuwen) and Jiang Shiyan (Zhang Xincheng) have been best friends since high school. In the world of the c drama You Are My Lover Friend 《舍不得星星 shě bù dé xīng xīng》, Tang Yang is a star student, smart and responsible. To Jiang Shiyan, she’s “Yang Ge (Big Brother Yang)”, the no-nonsense buddy who tells off his bullies and supervises his studies. Although she insists otherwise, both Jiang Shiyan and his mother swear he would never have made it to university if not for Yang Ge. Their families are really close, too: their mothers are best friends and dance class partners. It’s like they’re one big family from the start.

Fast forward through their late teens and early twenties and Tang Yang is back in their hometown with a PhD in finance and a shiny new position as a deputy director in the credit audit division of a big bank’s local branch. Jiang Shiyan has also made good: he’s CEO of Yixiu, a new media company and shopping platform specialising in food and restaurant reviews. It’s a business he built with Feng Weiran (Guo Yunqi), another high school buddy, and Cheng Hui (Wu Junting), an eccentric tech whiz of few words. Throw in Jiang Yanan (Guan Yue)—Feng Weiran’s wife and Jiang Shiyan’s second cousin—and we get a squad of five dedicated foodies regularly meeting up to stuff their faces and chat about everything and nothing.

Busy lives and promising careers haven’t come between Tang Yang and Jiang Shiyan—they’re as inseparable as ever. Jiang Shiyan, especially, is the sort of person anyone would be desperate to have in their corner (please, Zhang Xincheng is so good at playing ‘spoil market’ men; also refer to My Huckleberry Friends). He drives Tang Yang to work when she wakes up late in the morning and even remembers to pick up breakfast so she can eat in the car. He finangles reservations at hard-to-book restaurants for her, and when she ends up not making it he packs the food and drops it off at her workplace. He thinks of her first in everything, shielding her from harm where he can, making a note every time he comes across a good eatery so he can bring her in the future. It’s clear to the audience, even before Jiang Shiyan is willing to admit it to himself, that his feelings for Tang Yang go far beyond sworn brotherhood.

But once Jiang Shiyan realises he’s no longer satisfied with Tang Yang just being “Yang Ge”, he gets caught in a dilemma familiar to drama watchers: What to do with such a bombshell? They’re inseparable, friends who’ve had each other’s backs for more than a decade. Will a romantic confession end with rejection and make things awkward? Would he be risking the most important relationship in his life trying to turn his bro into his girlfriend? 

Tang Yang, meanwhile, is also realising just how much Jiang Shiyan means to her. When she begins to pick up on hints that perhaps his feelings might be at least a little bit romantic, she starts questioning herself, too—and is surprised by the answer she arrives at.

The friends-to-lovers trope is a very common one. But it’s still satisfying when it works, and it works in You Are My Lover Friend. There’s an ease between the two that speaks to their long-standing bond—they know each other inside out and both are confident that they’re valued and loved by the other. The only question is: What sort of love is it?

It’s a slow burn to them becoming a couple, and they do it in a very them way. There’s no big declaration of love to kick things off because there’s almost no need for that; they know each other so well that they can discern the deeper layers of meaning behind plain words. “Let’s just let things happen naturally,” Tang Yang, the slightly less certain of the two, tells Jiang Shiyan. What follows is a short period of awkwardness as both parties try desperately to “act natural”, suddenly reading so much more into each and every text message that they’d never have hesitated to send when they thought of themselves as nothing more than besties. It only goes to demonstrate how much they like each other, and the awkwardness melts away quickly. They eventually slide so smoothly into a romantic togetherness that, at one point, they have to discuss when, exactly, they officially became a couple—an important matter to settle so they can celebrate their anniversary in the future.

You Are My Lover Friend is a show about people who just fit together, like puzzle pieces. Tang Yang and Jiang Shiyan clearly fit as soulmates, but there are other relationships that click together. Feng Weiran and Jiang Yanan fit: a bubbly, goofy young couple starting a family while having lots of fun. As the three co-founders of Yixiu, Jiang Shiyan, Feng Weiran and Cheng Hui fit as perfect collaborators who have their own areas of expertise and a deep trust in one another’s judgment. The five friends have forged a deep bond through shared experiences; they tease, they play, they bicker but they’re a family no matter what. There’s even a secondary romance between Cheng Hui and celebrity actress Sheng Nina (Luo Qiuyun), who signs a contract with Yixiu to be one of their featured livestreamers. He’s famously low-profile while she’s just plain famous, yet they connect beautifully over their shared love for astronomy and food. Everyone had assumed that he was a weirdo lost in his own world, but over the course of the drama a tender, thoughtful side emerges—he just can’t be bothered with too many social niceties or making a fuss like others might do. Sheng Nina’s busy schedule doesn’t put him off and he doesn’t seek to control or manipulate; he just waits until she’s back. When media attention and public furore grows too much, Cheng Hui cuts through all the bullshit in his silent, steady way, and it’s just what she needs. Cheng Hui is one of my favourite—if not the favourite—characters in this show.

Not all is bright in the world of You Are My Lover Friend. Working as she does in the credit audit division, Tang Yang stumbles upon some unsavoury business, and Zhou Mo, her university senior who now works for an investment firm, seems to be up to something. But even the dark moments don’t cast much of a cloud over the friends. As Zhou Mo says, Tang Yang is so much more fortunate than so many others in the world. The same can be said of her four other friends. Relationships are never completely smooth—the show gives a nod towards this when Feng Weiran and Jiang Yanan navigate a rocky patch in their marriage—but You Are My Lover Friend is a story about how intensely lucky it is to find a place where you just belong in this big wide world, whether that’s with a group of best buddies or a significant other.

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