You were the daughter of a noble and at 8y you were promised to the crown prince. You didn’t like each other very much because you didn’t want to marry without love, you didn’t want this arranged marriage. Unfortunately you didn’t have many choices and had to spend a lot of time together, which didn’t change your relationship much. When you were promised to Li Jiang you had to prepare for years to be the future empress...and obviously later this occurred. You later became the empress.