Watching The Summer I Turned Pretty with my tween daughter has taken a slightly awkward turn in Season 3. There are a few more F-bombs and sexual scenarios between Belly, Jeremiah, Conrad, and their incestuous circle, though it’s still tame for the teen canon—more Dawson’s Creek than Cruel Intentions. The upside, however, to sitting through this questionable season of what has been a mostly dreamy series? It’s full of teachable moments.
Never follow your boyfriend to college, especially a seemingly mediocre college, as Belly does with Jeremiah to the fictional Finch. Do not get engaged at 21 (Belly and Jeremiah again, with the tiny ring that made TikTok shudder). And, most of all: If confronted with the same choice as modern heroines Lauren Conrad, Carrie Bradshaw, Rachel Green, and now Belly Conklin, skip Paris for no man.
Belly is a sweet everygirl upon whom viewers can seamlessly project, but as my colleague Elise Taylor astutely argued, her identity is all too bound up in the Fisher brothers. Her hobbies include lusting after them, dating them, hanging out at their beach house, contemplative night-swimming in their pool, and occasionally playing volleyball. Outside of a fleeting mention of sports psychology, Belly’s personal aspirations have been strangely lacking for a college-aged woman in 2025—which made it so satisfying when she shared, earlier this season, that she planned to study abroad in Paris. But then Belly scraps her Parisian plans and pledges her young life to Jeremiah, a rising super senior at Finch majoring in getting high and going to Cabo (which, quite honestly, is more age-appropriate than a wedding).
“How am I supposed to leave you for five months?” Belly asks Jeremiah, secretly hoping he’ll protest. “I don’t want us to be separated right after we get married.”
After a tepid “Are you sure?” from him and hollow reassurance from Belly, he utters the line that made both me and my daughter—she’s a quick study—scream in anguish: “Good, because I didn’t want you to go, either.”
I don’t want to pile on Belly—as Lola Tung, the actress who plays her, recently told Nylon, she’s just figuring things out—but a generation of TSITP viewers can learn from her mistakes. No man is worth missing Paris for. If a man is trying to keep you, whether overtly, subtly, or through emotional manipulation, from Paris, he is not your man at all.
The most compelling pop cultural evidence to this point is the Lauren Conrad Maxim. In a historical (2008) episode of MTV’s The Hills, the doe-eyed reality star/Teen Vogue intern—a boy-crazy everygirl not too unlike Belly, actually—passes on a summer work trip to Paris in order to stay in LA with her on-and-off boyfriend, Jason Wahler. Whether you were around to watch this live or not, you may already know that, predictably, Lauren and Jason broke up soon after.
“She’s going to always be known as the girl who didn’t go to Paris,” declared then Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Lisa Love—and Love was correct. Though Hills cast members have since revealed that the storyline, like most reality storylines, wasn’t entirely real, symbolically, the principle still holds: Choosing a man (fleeting) over Paris (eternal) does not typically age well.
And Lauren is far from the only example: There’s just something about Paris—the romance and whimsy, the golden light and Breton striped tees, the promise of pleasure and indulgence—that makes it a go-to foil for American romantic heroines and the boyfriends determined to lock them down. I’m still annoyed that Rachel Green bailed on Paris—and a job at Vuitton!—to be with Ross in the final moments of Friends. Could it not have been the one where she and Ross relocated for a couple of years of adventure? And despite the fact that it ended disastrously, Carrie Bradshaw still chose rightly when she flitted to Paris with Petrovsky in the final season of Sex and the City. She desperately needed to get out of the New York bubble; to give another man a chance (albeit one who ended up more in love with his light installations) to a score of French rap.
Happily, in the latest two episodes of The Summer I Turned Pretty, Belly turns brave: Following her and Jeremiah’s failed wedding day, she hops a spontaneous flight to Paris after all. Yes, she spent last week’s episode tracking an AirTag in her stolen backpack and rolling up to the club with her carry-on, but the city’s magic twinkles this week. Even while homesick and living with rude roommates, Belly recognizes that she’s “doing something truly on my own for the first time in my life.”
Paris “was a chance for me to test myself,” she says, “to find out what I was really made of.”
The solo self-discovery montage is a hallmark of any good romantic comedy—the heroine must be alone, at last, to find herself, like Julia Roberts figuring out what kind of eggs she likes in Runaway Bride. This penultimate episode was Belly’s. No longer cosseted in Cousins, she wears silver sequins and dances to Sophie Ellis-Bextor and once again speaks of psychology—at the Sorbonne! She hooks up with a Benson Boone-ish Mexican expat named Benito (who, like all men on this show, is smitten with her). What an unmitigated delight it is to watch Belly sleep with someone whose last name isn’t Fisher.
Conrad is quite obviously endgame, and his letters loom large ahead of the series finale. I’ll allow it, because unlike Jeremiah, he’s not (yet) trying to remand Belly to the States. “I hope Paris is everything you dreamed it would be,” he writes.
The lesson here is worth repeating. Skip Paris for no man—the good ones will still be there when you get back.
