This was going oh so smoothly during the courtship phase. I was engaged. I was having fun. The characters were amusing. 
 Then the pace started faltering, and something quite upsetting happened, but I thought hey, it might still pick itself back up. 
 Then something else happened which truly disgusted me and I cannot for the life of me imagine why the author would make such a choice. Our so-called heroine rapes her husband. She states quite plainly that she gets off on feeling like she has power and control over him, full well he's not consenting. He was clearly adamant on not having children before and she takes advantage of him when he's half-drunk and asleep, and then forcibly keeps him down when he tries to pull out when he's coming. That is something so terrible and unforgivable that he cannot even speak, but then after a period of separation and anger he gets himself into thinking he had actually consented to the act - and I find this utterly distasteful. If the roles were reversed I think it would be clearer to the author, perhaps, that the situation was unequivocally a rape. It was not consensual. It. was. rape. and after such an event I could not bring myself to be happy for the merry couple, even when a "healthy" dynamic was restored. (Healthy in quotation marks because... really? After that? I don't think so.) 
 Much lesser complaints I have with this book: at the very beginning, Daphne accepts a "you're not like other girls you're ~special" comment as a compliment. I wasn't thrilled but I went on, and... Daphne really thinks that everyone that isn't a Bridgerton or isn't Simon is a complete bore and an idiot, for all that apparently she is thought "the soul of kindness". Really? All of London's high society except those handful of people are uninteresting, boring, dull? I think that is being very superficial in judgement, and it most certainly does not make me root for the heroine.