To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)

directed by Susan Johnson

Sarah Kimura

“In young adult romances there’s just pure love. There isn’t like, ‘Oh honey, I would love to live with you, but I make more money than you.’”

- Mitski, 2017

CW: sexual assault

I always knew the boy I was supposed to fall in love with. He’s in a band, or likes all the ones you’re supposed to. He’s dreamy and says artful things that could be paraphrases from a movie we both like. He dresses effortlessly, says he’s a minimalist, and wants to mail me a book.

I want him to pull me closer. I want him to say we’re really “boyfriend-girlfriend.” I want him to kiss me.

When he finally does, all of it becomes so incredibly wrong.

I have half-dated two boys in my life, and definitely loved neither. I say half-date because they both gave me non-answers when I confronted them about actually dating. The first wrote songs on his guitar, wore plain white T-shirts, and went to art school. The second was a history major who did a lot of drugs in high school and went to class on a bike. They grew their hair long and looked at me with big eyes. They both fucked over more people than I after we parted ways.

The first told me that he was the devil. The second told me that sometimes he felt like he was Charlie in Flowers for Algernon, and felt like a ghost of him was watching us as he drunkenly gave me kisses I did not want. The first called me every Friday night. The second invited me to see indie movies. I wanted both of them to want me just a little. Not even a lot. I felt like if they did, then I could truly believe I was worthy of being beautiful and loved at the same time.

When I saw To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, I was past the target demographic age. But every symmetrical Wes Anderson shot and indie pop needle drop made me feel like I had finally found a new addition to the “Guilty Pleasure” shelf (despite the obvious and jarring Subway ad placements) alongside Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Stephanie Perkins novels. Growing up I had felt like romance was not actually something that would happen to me, but an indulgence I was saving up for. To All the Boys coincided with the convergence between the end of one faulty romance and the beginning of the next.

The first one ended with petty text messages, which is fair for a relationship where I was seventeen when I first met him. The second felt like it could be the first serious one. But I knew all of it was too good to be true when he began flirting like a playground romance—all tease and no confrontation—and one day I found myself climbing up a tree because I knew telling him the truth of what I felt would never come to anything. I knew because every single night spent with him at the college radio station where he spun three-hour audio collages of sleepy guitar music and obscure YouTube videos ended with listening to Joni Mitchell on the drive home. I couldn’t exactly figure out why I insisted on listening to “Blue” at the time but it seems so incredibly obvious now. I liked him, but I felt out of control and sad because I knew deep down that this feeling wasn’t truly coming from me.

To All The Boys came at a meteoric time in my life where I started to understand that sitting around striving to be loved might not be the best way to fall in love. This second boy falls on top of me last January in a horny frenzy; I can feel him reaching to really touch me. He’s driven away by my fear, but not enough to actually stop touching me. He insists on making out for the American College Tradition of being drunk and then regretting it later, but I’m certainly not drunk enough. I’m not compliant enough and it makes me feel not hot enough. When I protest I feel him getting frustrated with me. On romance fiction terms, I should be kissing back and playing to the rhythm, not nervously rambling and freezing up, letting his hands manipulate my limbs to his will. I realize a few days later that this is sexual assault.

My unwillingness to comply converts to utter self-disgust and shame. My desire for romance fades into juvenile pipe dreams. This is sex. This is what intimacy is, my body tells me. This is everything you’ve ever wanted, and more. And he has blue eyes.

Nothing I read for the next few months is enough to push the ugliness down.

Growing up with insomnia, I read lots and lots of YA romance fiction, and just like before, I eventually pick up the same books I used to read. I watch To All the Boys several times, and I feel safe in its arms, where faults are not only real, but come from fears that are nurtured into something healthy.

In the middle of the movie, when Lara Jean and Peter hang out in a diner after going to a house party, Peter confronts her about never dating anyone before.

“Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” he asks.

“I don’t know, I guess no one’s ever liked me like that,” she says, fiddling with her hands.

After some deliberation, she begins, “So love and dating. I love to read about it and it’s fun to write about, and to think about in my head. But when it’s real—”

“What, it’s scary?”

“...yeah.”

Lara Jean understandably wants to stay in her daydreams. When you’re in your daydreams, it feels impossible to be hurt in the way real life can hurt you. You feel prepared and mature and un-ugly. Boys don’t work out because it is forbidden or because of family feuds or some other circumstantial melodrama. And the circumstance of fake dating in To All The Boys inhabits the circumstance of something fictional, but focuses instead on the eventual real love to be found within it.

The diner scene marks when Peter begins to like Lara Jean, and we as an audience like him too. He pays attention to her and treats her with kindness, and does that thing where he really looks at her. It all sounds ridiculously simple, but that’s because it should be.

Lara Jean catches up and realizes that she likes him too. She is surprised by the little things—the kombucha, getting along with her sister, the handwritten notes—and that these are the real things and not the romantically constructed things. Not the standing-in-a-field-in-a-puffy-dress-with-my-sister’s-betrothed thing. The pretending turns into something real.

Josh represents a daydream crush that Lara Jean knows can never happen because anyone who is willing to date an ex-girlfriend’s sister is sorely misguided. It’s the harmful “forbidden love” trope that doesn’t seem to stop being appealing.

I half-dated those two boys because I was taught that when it feels wrong, it might actually be right, which is some fucked logic. I think about those two boys now and ponder why those situations fan out symmetrically on my timeline like a butterfly. I only ever chose men that I was sure would like “someone like me.” It didn’t matter if they were a good partner. I sailed past red flags in favor of The Kiss at the end as if I was speed-running a relationship. But it lowers my self worth to their insecurity, their weaknesses, and their cowardice. I felt like I was doomed to choose bad men. I used to reject one of Jenny Holzer’s truisms but it hits my emotional animal self like a silver bullet: “Romance was invented to manipulate women.” She’s talking about the invention of romance and not real love romance. Every book I read and movie I watched growing up I observed like research for the future. In my head lives the perfect Love Object, a monster conglomerate of ideas of the perfect date, the perfect kiss, the perfect partner, the perfect me to be with the perfect partner. I realize I told both boys I loved them because I thought that saying it would make it true. But I could not invent our romance by myself.

I see myself in the ways Lara Jean makes herself a vessel for a romance for one, where there actually isn’t room for someone else to join. People say things about her that reduce her and try to make her smaller (“You’re a sweet, innocent girl, and he’s a complete dick,” Josh says to Lara Jean, and “Don’t push her, she’s shy,” Gen says condescendingly). When Peter comes along, her ideas of herself and of others are challenged and changed. I deconstruct my Love Object in the same way, but alone.

I am not flawed because I choose bad men. I’m not stupid or weak for wanting someone to sweep me off my feet. I am not marked by my assault and not “not that kind of girl.” These harmful things were taught to me by the sneaky bends of the patriarchy that lie underneath so many books and movies made and sold to teenage girls. Teen girls deserve media that shows them as real. Lara Jean feels real to me because I see myself in her, and my fear of myself dissipates because it is possible to want love and not be battered by the world because of the belief that it happens because of desire.

Aside from this fear lies another mortal one, The End. Lara Jean and Peter Kavinsky are fictional, but what about my nonsensical little life? What happens if I am the one to inflict pain? I don’t have the answers yet because I haven’t gotten to living them like I have the others. I cling to a section of a Yeats poem:

“Ah, do not mourn,” he said,
“That we are tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell.”

Sarah Kimura is an undergraduate studying words (English) and pictures (art history) at CUNY Hunter College. She’s happy to be here.