With Love With You 有你的时光里 Review: A Quiet, Female-Led Healing Drama

A spoiler-light review and overview of With Love With You, with reflections on its themes of sisterhood, resilience, and healing.

With Love With You centres around Wang Yan (Tong Yao) and Wang Lingjun (Zhou Yiran), two sisters with starkly different personalities. Wang Yan is a highly successful account director in a creative agency who is independent, efficient, and fearless. Lingjun, on the other hand, is aimless, resentful, and wilful. Despite Wang Yan's considerable influence within the family and her insistence that the 30-year-old Lingjun obtain her medical practitioner's certificate before even considering leaving their hometown of Leshan, Lingjun defies everyone's wishes and relocates to Shenzhen, determined to be near her sister. This upheaval disrupts Wang Yan's carefully managed life, sparking conflict between the sisters and within their family.

The series is part of the growing subgenre of urban contemporary healing drama (都市治愈剧). As a healing drama, it focuses on emotional growth, resilience, and the quiet transformation of its characters as they navigate everyday life. Rather than relying on intense conflict, it finds meaning in small moments—shared meals, routine tasks, and simple interactions that slowly mend hearts and deepen relationships. While some healing dramas lean into melodrama, With Love With You favours a slice-of-life style, drawing viewers into the sisters’ pain, growth, and healing through small, intimate moments that feel both personal and universally resonant

While healing dramas have grown increasingly popular in China, what makes With Love With You stand out is its strong focus on the bond between two sisters—so much so that their relationships with the men in their lives remain secondary. Although the series features side stories involving people the sisters love, know and work with, these narratives primarily serve to reinforce the themes, illustrate the sisters' characters, or drive their development. By narrowing its focus to one pair of sisters, the series takes a unique approach, capturing the depth and intricacies of their symbiotic bond.

While romance isn’t usually the focus in healing dramas, the way it’s deemphasized here sets this series apart even further. In the early episodes, Lingjun shows no romantic interest in anyone. Instead, she spends her time alternating between annoying her sister, getting into trouble, and relying on Wang Yan to bail her out. Wang Yan, meanwhile, ends a relationship she knows she should have ended sooner. While it’s suggested that she and her immediate superior, Gao Qian (Li Zefeng), share a mutual attraction, she chooses to maintain a professional relationship as comrades in the company for a large part of the series.

As an aside, I found it quite amusing that some commenters' initial reaction to the trailer was to voice frustration with romances centred on strong professional women rejecting the "perfect" man, only to see their personal and professional lives fall apart before an epiphany leads them to win both a wealthy, eligible partner and a revived career. With Love With You couldn’t be further from that trope, offering a refreshing perspective instead.

Although it’s not explicitly stated in the first episode, it soon becomes clear that the bond between the two sisters is far from ordinary. While some might view this detail as a mild spoiler, the series itself doesn’t treat it as a major reveal. Wang Yan was born with congenital anaemia and would not have lived to adulthood if not for the arrival of her sister. Though the series only makes this connection explicit later, it hints early on that Lingjun’s birth occurred at an opportune time. It’s not difficult for viewers to deduce that Lingjun is a "saviour sibling"—conceived to save Wang Yan.

This makes the series even more compelling because, to my knowledge, this topic has yet to be explored in Chinese dramas and remains rare in international TV and cinema. The most famous example, My Sister's Keeper, emphasizes the ethical dilemmas of having a saviour sibling—specifically, the moral and emotional struggles of being expected to continually provide for an older sibling. In contrast, With Love With You shifts the focus to the emotional repercussions of such a relationship. Wang Yan’s independence and privacy conceal a deep sense of guilt and fear that her illness might return and burden her family again. Because Lingjun has already sacrificed so much, she is overly protected by both their parents and Wang Yan, whose greatest wish for her is to have an untroubled life—a dynamic Lingjun finds suffocating. Lingjun also harbours feelings of envy over the attention Wang Yan received during her illness, mixed with admiration for her sister’s accomplishments.

Because the series focuses so much on the two sisters, their relationship must be compelling enough to keep viewers emotionally invested throughout the 32-episode series. Tong Yao and Zhou Yiran beautifully capture the sisters' love-hate dynamic with genuine, natural chemistry. The way they bicker and argue yet rush to each other's aid is both heartwarming and relatable. Their portrayal captures the sometimes fraught, occasionally codependent, but ultimately the deeply connected and unshakeable nature of the sisters' relationship in a way that is not only believable but also thoroughly engaging, keeping viewers invested until the very end. There are many standout moments between them, such as when Lingjun, against her sister's advice, decides to become a caregiver and live in a dorm. On her first night, she is assigned a room in an empty block, and when a storm hits, she runs to her sister’s apartment in the middle of the night to seek shelter. Another striking scene is when Lingjun is bullied at work in the hospital, and Wang Yan steps in to fiercely defend her and demand justice.

Such compelling storytelling relies heavily on the strength of the performances, and the cast of With Love With You does not disappoint. Tong Yao’s nuanced performance captures Wang Yan’s mix of quiet strength, suppressed vulnerability, and guilt with remarkable restraint, while Zhou Yiran’s youthful, impulsive energy lends Lingjun a relatable messiness that complements her sister’s reserve. The two actors have a natural, believable chemistry that makes their characters' evolving bond feel authentic, whether they’re bickering or silently supporting each other. The supporting cast is uniformly strong as well. This marks Tong Yao’s second on-screen partnership with Li Zefeng, and their scenes crackle with unspoken tension—even in professional settings, the air between them is charged. Zhang Zixian, Jiang Mengjie, and Ning Xin also impress as Liao Fanmu, Li Fei, and Cao Kunkun, each portraying different shades of desperation and hope as they navigate love, independence, and survival. The weakest link is perhaps Victor Ma’s Yue Chuan, whose good looks soften Lingjun’s arc a little too much, making much of their subplot together feel featherlight in comparison to the heavier emotional threads elsewhere.

Just as the cast breathe life into their characters, the city of Shenzhen emerges as a character in its own right, shaping and testing them at every turn. Shenzhen is no mere backdrop—it’s central to the series’ themes of ambition, resilience and vulnerability, where characters are tested by both its opportunities and challenges. For Wang Yan, it symbolizes resilience—a place where she can defy her illness, prove herself in the advertising world, and secure her family’s future. For Lingjun, it offers freedom, though not without the struggles of maturity. Gao Qian chases its promise of ambition-driven success, only to lose himself. Meanwhile, Li Fei and Kunkun find the courage to break free from toxic relationships, redefining their lives in this city of dreams.. Against this dynamic tapestry of high rises, glitzy shops, and small local restaurants, the sisters’ relationship evolves, with their roles constantly shifting as they alternate between being protector and protected both for each other and for those around them.

Beyond the sisters and their sisterhood, Li Fei’s escape from Fang Li’s manipulation and Kunkun’s decision to leave a toxic relationship are reflections of women reclaiming agency and finding courage in the face of adversity. Wang Yan and Wang Lingjun’s roles in supporting these characters reinforce the series’ themes of sisterhood and solidarity, extending beyond familial ties to encompass broader female empowerment. While Wang Yan and Wang Lingjun’s bond forms the emotional core of the story, their relationships with Li Fei, Kunkun, their parents, and even Gao Qian and Liao Fanmu illustrate women navigating complex dynamics in pursuit of self-respect and independence.

With Love With You redefines what it means to find a happy ending, eschewing traditional romantic tropes to emphasize resilience and the quiet strength of sisterhood. This unconventional approach may challenge some viewers’ expectations, but it’s precisely what makes the series stand out. I admire its commitment to following its own vision rather than pandering to formulas or ratings.

With Love With You might not be without its flaws—its unhurried pacing can test patience, and Lingjun's story sometimes feel less fully realised than Wang Yan's. But for viewers willing to embrace a quieter narrative and accept that a satisfying ending isn’t always the one you expect or the one you want, the series offers heartfelt performances and a refreshing, emotionally resonant take on the healing drama genre. By redefining happy endings and celebrating the enduring strength of sisterhood—capturing the sentiment beautifully expressed by the sisters' father, "有你的时光 是最美的时光" (The time with you is the most beautiful time)—it sets itself apart as a thoughtful, tenderly crafted story well worth a watch.

Additionally:
I would like to eventually write a follow-up piece, to explore the series’ take on sisterhood, saviour sibling narratives, and female solidarity and on how unusual and quietly radical this ending is for a healing drama, especially in the C-drama landscape. I'm not sure if I'll ever have time to get to it but hopefully someday I will.

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