‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ may have helped this writer finally get over the bad boy paradigm.
This story contains Season 3 spoilers! You’ve been warned.
“I’m Team Jeremiah, and it’s kind of my low-key humble brag,” I say as I film myself in selfie mode.
“Being Team Jeremiah shows personal growth,” I tell my phone, “Because I finally picked the consistent and emotionally available guy.”
I rewatch my video, analyze my words, caption it #TheSummerITurnedPretty, and post it.
My opinion is unpopular. Since The Summer I Turned Pretty’s third and final season premiered, it seems like the entire world is Team Conrad. If you haven’t seen it, the Amazon Prime series, based on the book by Jenny Han, centers around two brothers, Conrad and Jeremiah, and their relationships with long-time family friend Belly. Everyone from major media outlets to billion-dollar corporations like Delta Airlines have weighed in. Conrad is set up as the predetermined first love we’re encouraged to root for.
Which is why Jennifer Lawrence broke the internet last week when she agreed with me and revealed, despite her friends’ (and Robert Pattinson’s) objections, she is Team Jeremiah.
The odds were not in our favor.
The hit coming-of-age teen drama has been my hyperfixation for the last three years. But becoming over-invested in television shows started in 2003, when I first saw what I thought love should look like on The O.C., watching Ryan Atwood carry a limp Marissa Cooper down an alleyway in Tijuana after she overdosed on sleeping pills.
Since then, I’ve been a longtime champion of the misunderstood bad boy.
I’d go on to claim Team Damon in The CW’s The Vampire Diaries and Team Logan in Veronica Mars. I wanted dinner dates like Chuck and Blair’s on Gossip Girl, when my reality was twelve miles from Manhattan, in the New Jersey suburbs, getting felt up in the backseat of a Toyota Corolla in a Burger King parking lot.
I had dated Chucks, Logans, and Conrads throughout high school, college, my early twenties, and my mid-twenties. Like the boys I shipped on screen, the boys I chased IRL were also emotionally unavailable. Compliments and answered texts didn’t stand a chance against mind games and being ignored. I collected the breadcrumbs these young men laid out for me, and whenever I had definitely gotten over them, they’d invite me to a fraternity formal or send me a meme. I caved every time.
The summer I turned twenty-five felt like putting glasses on for the first time and realizing I had been living with bad eyesight. It was also the age I started therapy and unpacking complicated family trauma—my father leaving when I was four and Marissa Cooper’s death on The O.C.
Years of therapy taught me to identify behavioral patterns and helped me unlearn the love I learned from television. Men who weren’t interested in me started to give me the ick. If they didn’t text me after a date, instead of reading into their Instagram and mentally drafting our vows, I deleted their numbers.
I’ve noticed a recent cultural trend of fans revisiting shows from decades earlier and re-evaluating the relationships they used to celebrate. Love interests that were once seen as romantic, like Carrie and Big in Sex and the City, are now being seen for what they truly are: toxic. Time and fully developed frontal lobes are to blame. Since these shows aired, fans have gone on to date, marry, have kids, go to therapy, divorce, and remarry. If The Summer I Turned Pretty follows this pattern, in ten years, popular culture will dethrone Conrad Fisher from “hero” to “villain”—just like we’ve seen done (rightfully so) to Dawson Leary, Lucas Scott, and countless other broody boys.
JLaw is just ahead of the trend.
Conrad Fisher may not be a serial killer like Damon Salvatore or a sexual predator like Chuck Bass, but his unpredictable behavior shouldn’t be romanticized either. Sometimes Conrad intends to be mean—like when he used Belly’s insecurities and told her to “look in the mirror some more”—but most times, he’s not a malicious person. Still, the impact of his actions hurt the people he claims to care about. Conrad is consistently inconsistent right up to the night before Belly’s wedding to Jeremiah, when he confesses that he still loves her, only to take it back the next morning. To put it as Jennifer did, “Conrad is toxic.”
Jeremiah, on the other hand, loves Belly out loud. In earlier seasons, he frequently compliments Belly’s appearance, takes her on driving lessons, and encourages her to rejoin the volleyball team she had quit. Sure, there is the season three Cabo incident that revived the age-old Friends “we were on a break” debate, but Jeremiah atones for his sins. Not telling Belly about Cabo is one of the only times Jeremiah doesn’t communicate well. His emotional vulnerability and openness are refreshing for women who’ve dated avoidant men.
When I found myself choosing Jeremiah, the golden retriever underdog, instead of Conrad, the tortured poet, I realized my decade-long healing journey finally paid off.
I texted my therapist that I no longer needed her services. I was Team Jeremiah now. I was healed.
JLaw and I are not the only two people on Team Healing. I learned from the thousands of comments on my TikToks that there’s a contingent of us in a small corner of the internet:
I married my Jeremiah. My Conrad was the same moody, emotionally unavailable, and distant guy I’m seeing here.
I’m 26, and it’s Jeremiah for me. Communication and emotional maturity for me.
Yessss exactly!!!!! Growing up all TV shows blinds us to like guys like Conrad and they’re just so toxic. I’m so glad I can see it now.
Many of the toxic love stories we’re sold romanticize first loves because the trope claims to prove destiny. But the idea that first loves are the strongest implies that women aren’t allowed to grow, change their minds, and have many relationships.
It is not coincidental that women, like JLaw, are leaning into the Jeremiahs of the world now that we’re more connected than ever. In the nineties and early aughts, there wasn’t an easy way to voice your unpopular opinions and have them be heard by the masses (unless you were a message board warrior like me—IYKYK). Today, apps like TikTok allow us to write our own narratives and easily share ideas with one another. We no longer have to buy what the CW is selling us. Social media is opening a dialogue about what a healthy relationship looks like—both on and off the screen.
In the five years I’ve been on TikTok, I’ve seen many viral videos of women encouraging other women to reassess and demand more from their relationships. There was the woman whose husband didn’t fill her Christmas stocking for ten years, and the bride whose groom smashed her face in their wedding cake, after she asked him not to. Just last month, a woman shared that when she asked her husband to bring her lunch, he packed her two-day-old Chipotle and dog food. The internet collectively responded with the trending TikTok song, chanting, “Leave your husband! Leave, leave, your husband!” (I have often wanted to play this song during a Belly and Conrad scene).
Being Team Jeremiah is more than just a few women on the internet with a hot take—it’s indicative of a larger cultural shift in which women are encouraging other women to no longer tolerate poor behavior from toxic men.
Still, whenever I post a new video about The Summer I Turned Pretty, I come across die-hard #Bonrad fans of all ages. I try to meet these bad boy apologists with grace because I was once one of them. I provide facts, evidence, and personal anecdotes to convince them that shipping boys like Conrad, in fiction and in life, is rarely worth the effort.
I rejoice a little every time a fan decamps to Team Jeremiah. I imagine Jennifer Lawrence does too.
There is still time for Belly to pick Jeremiah, or anyone else besides Conrad, now that The Summer I Turned Pretty: The Movie was announced. The minority of us who were not swayed by the Conrad propaganda can hope that our special girl will continue to evolve as a young woman, and that her romantic interests will change with time. She is, after all, only 22.
Until then, I will keep making TikToks until every woman knows: you don’t need to suffer to be loved. Choose the golden retriever. Choose the boy whose love is steadfast, joyous, and warm. Choose the love you don’t have to claw your way into. Choose the Jeremiahs—it’s the only option if you love yourself.
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by Brittany Paige
Brittany Paige is a Hoboken, NJ based illustrator and writer who also owns a pop culture stationery and gift business. Her thoughts/obsessions/rants on pop culture and art can be found on TikTok and Instagram (both @brittanypaigedesigns). Every year on May 18th, she takes the day off to grieve the tragic loss of her good friend, Marissa Cooper.
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