The 12-year-old Vivian meets the main protagonist for the first time at her birthday party where She is being bullied by a group of children from Noble families who are jealous of her.
It is then the male protagonist comes to her rescue and protects her from bullies which causes the naïve Vivian to immediately fall in love with him, and when her father comes back from one of his business travels, she doesn't hesitate to ask him to arrange a marriage between the two families and get betrothed them to each other and the archduke guilty father's heart couldn't bear to say no to her so he decided to extend a proposal to the male protagonist family.
The protagonist's family elders and his father see this as an opportunity to connect and also take advantage of the powerful archduke power and the connection immediately agrees to the marriage proposal but this causes the male protagonist to grow to hate her because he believes that she decided his fate on whine just because she comes from a more powerful family and when Vivian finally get married to the male protagonist when she was at the age of eighteen on her birthday and the male protagonist was about to clock twenty.
The male protagonist still refused to give his heart to her, and never for once had he entered her room not to talk of going through their matrimonial duties meanwhile he and his family benefited from her family power and connection which helped him grow influence in the high society and also enough power to go against his father.
Meanwhile, the innocent Vivian whose life is just like that of a fool in love, tries everything in her power to make a selfish husband happy and hopefully fall in love with her just so that she can have his attention.
She not only changed her extravagant lifestyle, she also tried acting and dressing like the male lead's dead mother, plain and simple, making her not only look boring but also quite too mature for her age, but despite that, she remains one of the most beautiful ladies in the Empire, but despite all these not only did the male lead not change and but it also become worse when the main lead meant met the beautiful refreshing and classy female protagonist would just make a debut into the high society.
She's just a daughter of the baron, but the way she dresses and carries herself is more classy and elegant than most daughters of high-ranking nobles' families which makes quite a lot of noblemen including the male lead fall for her beautiful, refreshing, and innocent act and look, but even though The female protagonist has a lot of admirers, most of them are not ready to marry her legally as their wife but rather want to have her as a mistress because, at the end of the day, she is just an ordinary noble lady that comes from an ordinary baron family and one that is drowning in debts for that matter and even though agreeing to be their mistress will pay her family's debt the female protagonist refuses to be with any of them and said that she would rather be farmer's wife, then be an emperor's mistress And this further fuel the main protagonist determination, making him more deterred to the voice to divorce his wife and get married to the female protagonist.
Even though in the novel the male lead and the female protagonist never go beyond holding hands probably because the author did not want to destroy the male protagonist's persona because everyone knows how much readers hate cheaters, there are several scenarios of the male lead and the female protagonist going on small little dates and even had some heart-warming moment like the male lead saving the female protagonist from thugs or probably from an arrogant nobleman that tries to harass the female protagonist or most common cases where she is being bullied by other noblewoman or which seems unnecessary to me.
Number one reason is in the first place what is the female protagonist doing in an alley alone without any guard to protect her since she's a noblewoman and also since she was praised for her intelligence then she should be able to handle all her problems without the need for anyone help especially like when those noblewomen were bullying her.
To most intelligent readers like me, it is obvious that the female protagonist is just a green tea bitch that is pretending to be a white lotus and there are too many coincidence meetings between the male leads and the female protagonist which seems almost planned to me to fuel the male leads feelings to the female protagonist.
In the novel, when the naive villainess, Vivian catches wind of the affair of the male lead, her husband, and the female protagonist, she is so disheartened that she decides to heed her maid's advice and starts to bully the female protagonist who is rumored to be her husband mistress with her power and influence to make her back out even though her heart couldn't bare to be the reason why someone is suffering so her people carry out the bullying on her behalf and this cause the male lead to hate her even more because he comes to believe that the villainess is just a power-drunk woman that pretends to be innocent and kind to people which cause a lot of readers to come to hate the villainess and she was permanently labeled as the villainess and even some readers that pitied her and supported her in the early stages of the novel starts to hate her and started supporting the female protagonist believing that she had them fooled.
But to me, I felt like it was the female protagonist that fooled them all and this is the reason why a lot of ordinary people can't survive in the high society because their minds are too simple, and they won't know when they will be eaten without even their bone surviving.