Every couple of months, my social media feeds get filled with fuzzy fancams of the latest streamer romance. It happens against my will. I actively try not to engage, but the algorithm knows me better than I know myself – I will see the opening seconds of an ardent declaration of love, maybe in the rain, and my thumb will hover. Last month, it was snippets from Netflix’s My Oxford Year, which – from what I could gather – was about an American woman with straight hair falling for a posh British man with a terminal illness. This was preceded by My Fault: London, where an American woman fell for a posh British man who liked cars, and Upgraded, where an American woman fell for a posh British man who wore a suit on a plane. I don’t know the details of any of these landfill romances, and I make it my business not to. I consider myself a true, seasoned romantic, thank you, and these AI-generated plotlines, glossy colour palettes and clunky scripts – purposefully inauthentic and unbelievable – are an insult to my way of life.

This time, it’s the Amazon Prime series The Summer I Turned Pretty, which, with its weekly episode drops, is dripfeeding crack-laced YA nostalgia to the masses. Not since 2024’s Challengers has my feed been in such a thrall, with grown women in their twenties and thirties making memes, slowmo gifs, and loud declarations about their alignment to either team ‘Jelly’ or ‘Bonrad’. Some share videos recorded on their phone of the show, playing on their laptop screens, their hands visibly shaking with emotion. Others film themselves watching the episodes, weeping. The reaction has been so intense that Amazon has had to issue a reminder that it is fiction, urging viewers to stop threatening cast members. After a few days of being captivated by this behaviour, I knew: I was going to have to watch this stupid show.

For those unfamiliar, the plot follows a girl called Belly who gets caught in a love triangle between two brothers. The older, Conrad, is her elusive first love; the younger, Jeremiah, is the bouncy golden retriever she’s supposed to be marrying. For the whole three seasons, we watch her flip-flop between the two of them against the idyllic backdrop of coastal New England. There is an abundance of cringe in this show: painfully long and nonsensical dance scenes, acoustic guitar performances, lingering eye contact soundtracked by the dulcet whispers of Taylor Swift. The characters are privileged kids in their late teens and early twenties, but they act (and dress) about two decades older, weathered, somehow, by cynicism and their own needlessly narrow horizons. Belly shouts and cries a lot. Jeremiah opens his eyes very wide, so you can see that they are blue. Conrad broods.

I’ve been trying to understand the appeal of this show. At first, I thought it was just second-screen brainrot, but it’s clearly filling a void, manufacturing a dream that many women seem to be desperate for. This is partly because it’s built on easy, time-tested formulas. Firstly, it is about a love triangle, like all the most viral and enduring romances of the last few hundred years. In a limiting world that measures worth by sexual appeal, we have always loved to feel both hot and valuable; it’s the fantasy of desire in stereo. Secondly, it plays on nostalgia: the show is admittedly a very evocative, sensual portrait of being young in the summertime. The beach stretches out wide in most scenes, an open horizon that seems to promise everything. At that age, romantic love carries the hope of salvation; the guilty pleasure lies in believing that it still does.

Then there is Conrad Fisher, played by Christopher Briney, who is pure female gaze; the kind of yearny, tormented figure that inspires ferality. We’ve seen his character before, over and over again: it’s Mr Darcy, Gabriel Oak, Christian Grey, Edward Cullen, Xaden Riorson. These men are stoic, overburdened with responsibility, but always steadfast in their love, looming tall in the distance like mournful sequoias. They’re thoughtful, protective and practical, doing good deeds but never seeking glory. They’re lovably old-fashioned, shunning texts and DM slides for handwritten letters. They’re poor communicators, withholding just enough to keep your heart rate up. When they do eventually profess their love – and they always do – it pours out like a burst dam, with language so forceful it brings you to your knees. See: Frederick Wentworth’s letter to Anne Elliott, Mr Rochester’s proposal to Jane Eyre, Conrad Fisher’s beach confession.

You can tell that these characters were written, for the most part, by women. It’s not that men like Conrad don’t exist in the real world, but they read more and more like myths in the popular imagination – comforting totems for a culture where intimacy feels more like risk than refuge. These myths are mostly created by social media, which has made real-life romance into a site of danger. On TikTok, you’ll find endless dating advice warning women about love-bombers, ghosters and avoidants of every flavour (is he fearful? Dismissive? Anxious? Pick your poison). We’re told that there are no unwavering love affairs anymore, just situationships; that great love declarations are red flags, destined to be followed by months of unexplained ghosting. When Sabrina Carpenter’s latest song is about getting “wet” for a guy who knows how to use his phone, you know the bar is with Satan.

As a result, women of all ages seem increasingly to be escaping into fictional characters, clinging to them like emotional life rafts. There are benefits to this: they can model standards, awaken longing, and help us clarify what we want from a partner. But they can also lead to a fetishised, overly aesthetic view of romance, one which prioritises the performance of love over the messy, mutual work of it.

Although I think a lot of the current discourse around dating is an illusion, there’s no doubt the apps have made romantic love feel more disposable, encouraging a grass-is-greener mentality beloved by fuckboys and girls the world over (social media has also made us teeerrrrrrible communicators, but that’s a rant for another time). The algorithm is also pushing our most extreme fears – of vulnerability, rejection, disappointment – to the top of our feeds, making us more suspicious and inward-looking. An overpowering instinct for self-preservation is giving way to risk aversion, which is leading to emotional cowardice, and ultimately to absolute, stultifying boredom. And that’s the problem: modern love doesn’t feel dangerous or sweeping anymore; a lot of the time, it just feels dull.

Maybe that’s why shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty have us in such a chokehold: they offer the high drama of romantic risk, without any of the actual risk. It’s a neat, glossy story of longing, an easy escape from the desert of the real. And judging by our intensifying appetite for (and reaction to) these stories, that fantasy might already be becoming more sustaining than reality.