You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love

Olivia Rodrigo dropped her new record in June, and somewhere in there she mapped out the whole arc of falling in love.

Because falling in love has stages — that dopamine-flooded stretch where you can feel yourself going under.

The album opens with "Drop Dead," and that's where the story starts.

Phase 1: the attraction.

You meet someone and everything about them looks good. You just want to know more, be around them more.

Then comes "Stupid Song" — my favorite, personally. This is the part of a relationship where one person takes up all the room in your head, and all you want is for them to be wherever you are.

From there we're straight into the heart of it:

Honeybee

u + me = <3

This is the stretch where everything looks perfect. You're in it. You have what you wanted.

But life isn't all love, and that's when the record turns into its "Seem Pretty Sad" half — starting with "The Cure."

Here she talks about her own head working against her, convincing her the relationship might not be right, that she's lonely, unsure of herself.

And she lands somewhere true: when you're not okay on your own, no relationship is going to fix that. Only you can.

This same stretch gives us the collaboration with Robert Smith of The Cure — "What's Wrong With Me" — where she works out that leaving is the only way forward.

The chapter closes on "Less," a song about loving someone enough to let them go, and how much that costs.

The relationship is over. This is the part where you look for ways to hold on to the memories, or tell yourself tomorrow will feel better.

And then it ends on the one that, for me, is the whole point.

Expectation

By now you've learned something. You know what you want, and probably what you don't want anymore, and you head back out into your life carrying expectations instead of wounds.

Maybe that's what growing up is. You stop looking for songs that describe how you got hurt and start finding the ones about who you're turning into.