The first comment beneath The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Instagram post from Wednesday—candlelit shots of Belly and Benito in a café, captioned “Paris era unlocked”—got 20,276 likes within a few hours and said it all.
“Listen Benito,” a fan wrote. “I’m sure you’re a nice guy. But we don’t have time for this.”
It was the perfect crystallization of the low-key horror millions of TSITP fans have been feeling over Belly’s trip abroad. I’ve been having silent conversations with women I don’t know in the grocery store for weeks: Jeremiah’s going to tell her not to go, isn’t he? another mom might beam to me in produce, to which I, putting anything but peaches in my bag, would beam back: Of course he is. Not only that, but she’s going to choose either him or Conrad over the experience and her own personal potential, activating decades-old frustrations amongst us TV fans who have been hurt by Paris over and over.
Paris? you say, if you were born after 1998. What did Paris do to you? To quote Sabrina, a constant muse for TSITP (Belly’s desk shot, in episode 10, is a direct homage to Audrey Hepburn in the film), “Paris is always a good idea.” That is, unless you’re an American TV heroine, or someone who loves her. Somehow, right at the moment millennial women were becoming adults, Paris emerged as the official travel destination of girls punking out on themselves for a boy. The place that earnest, striving women our age went to discover with lightning speed that no, they didn’t want bread and excitement and cheese and romance and fashion and art. They wanted that mid guy back home, forever, they’ll take whatever flight you have!
First there was Rachel Green, in the Friends finale, getting off the plane for Ross. We loved that, we wanted that—Paris didn’t feel like an affront to opportunity yet, maybe because Rachel’s ascendance at Ralph Lauren wasn’t exactly earned. But the template had been set, Paris marked as a shorthand for the pinnacle of female achievement—only the most stylish, successful, and generally it would be summoned there—and established as the option only a truly singular love could outshine.
Except that four years later, on The Hills, Lauren Conrad passed it up for a guy with frosted tips and sleepy vibes. When Conrad, who starred in the reality juggernaut, was offered a summer job in Paris on-camera, she was portrayed as deciding to live at the beach with her boyfriend instead. Since then, the storyline has been debunked: Conrad said in a retrospective that she actually turned down the trip because she was exhausted from filming the show itself. And in the end, despite the fact that the show shot a scene depicting Conrad’s colleague, Whitney Port, on a flight there, no one ever went to Paris. None of this matters. Conrad’s status as “the girl who didn’t go to Paris” is cemented in the psyches of everyone who came of age on her timeline.
