In truth, love at first sight between people was exceedingly rare. Even love itself was a luxury. More often, it was a fondness with a clear purpose, or a helpless arrangement of muddling through life together.
Such purposeful fondness was easy to understand. I liked your talent, liked your looks, liked your wealth, liked your power, or even liked you because you carried the shadow of someone else. All of that was fondness with a purpose.
In truth, most relationships between men and women began this way.
It had nothing to do with absolute, pure love or emotion. Whether feelings would develop later was also an unknown.
Could a young woman truly fall in love with an old man simply because he had money, after spending a long time with him solely for that money?
Living together as partners was even simpler. Like modern blind dates, most people weighed each other's family backgrounds and personal conditions. If they seemed roughly equal and reasonably compatible, they could get married. Feelings would then slowly be cultivated afterward, and they were mostly familial affection rather than love.
As for true love, of course it existed. The best way to describe it was: love knew not where it began, yet once begun, it ran deep.
Meng Zhao himself was a rather emotionally detached person. Even his feelings for Liang Muqiu had been mixed with far too many factors. There were certainly feelings, and they ran deep, but it was absolutely not pure love untainted by anything else.
Likewise, Tan Cai'er was satisfied with Meng Zhao's looks, family background, cultivation, and potential. What stirred her heart was the change in her physique, something internal influencing her heart and spirit, creating this unusual closeness.
She might not love Meng Zhao, yet she felt close to him.