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.
