He is respecting her honer as a knight.. he doesn’t want to force his feelings onto her because he knows that if he really wished for it or if paulina knows that if this caused him pain he will rather marry him basically she lives breathes and dies for him she will do anything to make him happy
He may be emperor but he's not an absolute monarch. The time period of the story seems to be based on times before absolute monarchy. In normal monarchy, the king/emperor does not hold all the power. Meaning the nobility (all of them together) have almost as much and sometimes even more power than the king/emperor. When he came back from war he had to struggle to solidify his position and he got married to the concubines due to pressure from the nobles. Even now his position is not stable since he doesn't have an heir. They only mentioned him once but the ML is supposed to have a brother which the nobles wanted to crown emperor while the ML was away on the war. This is still a reality.
I personally think that in the western and new world, when we think of rulers we think of them as absolute rulers. However, Asia didn't have an era of absolute monarchy. I find that stories centered around royalty from Chinese/Korean/Japanese authors usually depict the struggle of power existent in constitutional (non absolute) monarchies where the sovereign has limited power.
And there’s o b v i o u s l y more honor and sense in taking in as an empress for the sake of and raising a child in a loveless marriage?
Marrying for love is a modern concept. In older times, people married out of necessity and duty. Even a hundred years ago, people got married without love. Also has nothing to do with honor. How do you think nobles came into existence? They were fully concerned with obtaining and maintaining power. That's how the monarchy power structure functioned and how it lasted for so long. Marrying out of love wasn't what put nobles above the rest. Marrying a commoner out of love goes against the idea of what a noble is in the first place. Furthermore, historically, empires are very quick to fall as conquered nations tend to not assimilate into the empire. ML married the concubines from the nations he conquered to stabilize the empire (no revolts from the new conquered nations in the empire, less racism, etc). He married them all to give all groups a fair chance at the throne so no nation can complain.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that there is a lot of power play involved. It's not a simple "love conquers all" fantasy with happy endings and whatnot. It's also not a simple unrealistic "he's king. he can do whatever he wants" story. If you don't understand what the wall between them is, I don't think you really understand this genre. There's a lot of context and subtleties involved.
The ML is too lukewarm with his feelings. I dont care if his sense of duty is so strong to take in 3 concubines just to produce an heir or just a coward not to confess and lose Pauliana as an indispensable friend. FOR GODSAKE HE IS KING ALREADY. What rule is he trying so hard to preserve that he didn’t even try to break through Pauliana’s “denseness” towards his feelings... UGH I JUST FEEL LIKE IT’S THE MOST UNNATURAL DRAMA. THERE ARE ZERO OBSTACLES YET HERE WE ARE.