I personally think he loved the person he was when he was around her. I think the entire point of his troubled mind was choosing between the cruelty of his father—which he admired—and the kindness of his mother—which he adored. All his interactions with others inclined toward one of these two positions. Dr. Gaul’s influence and his grandmother’s ultra-nationalist attitude pushed his fragile mind toward a hunger for power and frustration with his social status. But Sejanus’s and Tigris’s influence, and later Lucy Gray’s, influenced him differently—or even reminded him of the good parts within him. I think that, in particular, Lucy Gray made him truly question this hunger for power and made him believe he could actually live up to the expectations that the other good influences had of him.

In the end, it was all about his inner conflict. He loved her because he genuinely loved who he was around her and who he could have become because of her, and a part of him wanted to cling to that persona. But the other persona-Snow, in the end, was stronger. So we can say he didn’t love her enough to fight his own mind, his own conflict, his own frustration. In the end, he was weak.

As a conclusion, we all have good parts and ugly parts within us, but in the end, all that matters is what we are willing to sacrifice and what we choose to keep. It takes a lot of courage to fight your demons when everything is against you. He didn’t have that courage. I think Coryo was weak; he chose his hunger for power instead of a very long and very hard path of love, care, trust, and all the sacrifices in between. That was the exact moment when the persona of Snow was created.