Feminine intuition

Olivia Rodrigo, Eva Illouz, narrativizing

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Imagine you’re at a party. You see her coming from across the room. Something beyond your five senses registers the animalish scent of loneliness emitting from her. She finds you at a lull, your last conversation partner having drifted away to find another beer. Somehow these girls always find you. Within just a few minutes of talking, this woman anoints you her confidante. She doesn’t know anyone else at this party. She’s here because she thought someone would be here but he’s not.

She begins to tell you the story of her relationship with this man. No, they haven’t been seeing each other very long, but this one is different. She doesn’t know what to do. Every twist and turn results in her spinning out for a few hours or days before he swoops back in and she tumbles back into his bed. The sex is incredible. Gone are the days of the bad hookups and mediocre dates. This man takes her to dinner. He is attentive, his bathroom isn’t disgusting. Then he doesn’t text for two days again. She’s worried sick he might be seeing someone else. Or if he isn’t, maybe he will find someone he likes better than her if they continue to only see each other casually.

The story she casts sounds oddly familiar. But you keep listening as the girl plays the game of willful self-delusion. The girl was cool with keeping it casual (she really was!) until her feelings came along and knocked her off the highest point of the swing. She withstands uncertainty with this man because it does feel different, because somehow—magically, alchemically, mystically, wonderfully, sexually, emotionally, historically, earth shatteringly—it is. He may have raised some red flags, but she insists they were only flashes. She can see the good in him because no one alive has ever been better than this. Breathlessly, she tells you, as if it’s not obvious, that she knows it’s crazy, but she’s in love.

You’ve heard this story before because you were once the very same girl at the party.

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Since its release, I’ve been listening almost exclusively to Olivia Rodrigo’s new album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. As my friend Leah said, the album title and the songs within are “very us coded.” Yes, it’s safe to say I have been that girl (reader: I am that girl).

For years I resisted Olivia’s music because even casual listening made me regress into much more insecure years of my life. It was too raw, too young. But as soon as I heard “drop dead,” I was hooked. The day of the album’s release, I listened to it on a plane ride home from Paris, my love dozing beside me. The rest of the record has made good on the promise of her excellent earlier records, but this time, much like love, something was different for me.

Unsurprisingly, I have struggled to write this essay. It is difficult to write about music in general given its mystical quality. Beyond analysis of lyrics, there is simply the way a song can make you feel. And this record has been full of feelings remembered and current for me. Millions of other listeners can relate.

The album, with each listen, has unfurled more thoughts about relationships and all their complexities than I can keep up with. Even discussing an early draft of this essay with my boyfriend, I got so excited that I lost my train of thought and the idea that, at least in the moment, seemed like the key to understanding everything slipped away before I could catch it again. In a recent profile of Rodrigo for Pitchfork, Shaad D’Souza writes: “Mapping out the emotions in a single song on her new album [...] would be like trying to make your way out of an ant colony: each idea opens new passages to explore, new feelings to chart.”

Rodrigo is an expert renderer of the specific into the universal. She knows too that when performing, she has become an icon rather than a person, for her sold out crowds—a vessel into which legions of fans can transubstantiate her for their own lived experience. The record and the singer capture not only the magic of pop, but also the magic of a good love story. You can see yourself so wholly in it that you aren’t yourself anymore.

But Rodrigo’s mirror-like pop storytelling is not what is most interesting to me about the record. What strikes me most through my (many) listens is just how different women are able to experience relationships. And it’s more than the lived experience, rather what women interpret the experience to be, and to what length. Quite simply, the album is a deep study in the ways women narrativize relationships and how men don’t.

Narrativizing is the extensive, ongoing romanticization and extensive analysis of a relationship that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. In turn, the woman’s narrativizing can create a hypersensitivity to the emotional world of the relationship, which the man is often unaware of, or at the very least, takes up a lot less psychic energy for him. In her hyper awareness, she may come to discover a disconnect between the external image of her relationship and the internal world she has obsessively created. Maybe it’s what Olivia Rodrigo refers to as “feminine intuition,” which is a fitting descriptor for the unconscious feelings that are sewn into the record.

What about that feminine intuition leads us to narrativizing? Why are women so damn good at writing a story we know will break our own hearts?¹

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It was all bright colors and fifty roses and cinematic walks through the neighborhood daydreaming about our syrupy mornings and counting down the hours until I saw you next. Every song was about you. The most alive I’ve ever been. I kept obsessive notes, drafted texts, and journaled long, moon-eyed entries about our days-long dates. I wrote about you in this project, hoping you’d decode my quite obvious missives. I’d never felt more right, more wrong, more insane.

Walking through the park with my head high. I only wanted one thing. With a hand on my heart I swore, nobody’s ever wanted somebody more. I felt like I was going crazy. Physically, psychically, spiritually, in pieces. I tried hard to distract myself. I couldn’t think of anything but you. Shock of my life to find out you felt the same. Like a headwind out of nowhere, we were in love.

Certain then that our love was fated. I was in a movie of my own making. If there is a God it’s the bond that’s between us two. My grand declarations teetered on bombastic. At the club one sweltering summer night after you’d been gone a few weeks, I told you I thought we were soulmates. You agreed, your face in technicolor. The next morning, you affirmed the way I felt but revised your agreement, that you weren’t sure if soulmates existed. I didn’t care. I was still recording our epic, piece by piece.

The more I was consumed in the narrative of our relationship, the more details I noticed. Most kept me buoyant, especially in the long hours squirreled away in your room, but when we parted, there were days tinged with a sadness I couldn’t explain. The story from here isn’t hard to piece together. Being in love in the twenty-first century has a certain arc. What if we began to want different things? Doubt crept in. Not about you—of you I have always been sure. I began to doubt my capacity to hold onto all those big dreams until I tied myself to you.

Other days, as the golden hues of the honeymoon transformed into the cooler tones of domesticity, I worried about whether you’d stay once it got too comfortable. The harder I looked for evidence about how you felt, the harder it was to find. To find it, I transitioned from savoring the free fall to feeling like a zombie in my body. A car speeding down the boulevard without a brake. I’d lost something, but it wasn’t you. Yes our worlds had blended, but somehow I had melted so completely, until it just felt sad.²

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Recently reading Madame Bovary, I was struck by a passage that perfectly aligns with pretty sad’s B side. Flaubert describes a woman’s sixth sense that love is slipping away, as Emma Bovary realizes midway through her affair that “The great love in which she swam as in an element, seemed to be growing less dense beneath her, like the water of a river contracting in its bed. She saw the mud, but would not believe her eyes and redoubled her tenderness.” Or as Rodrigo sings, Is that a normal thing to fight back the waves of a static lover’s dread?

The details with which Rodrigo plants her own uncertainty blend with details of narratives real and imagined of my own making, of Madame Bovary’s, and of thousands of other women in love.

By the end of Side A, there aren’t that many descriptions about her lover’s actual behavior. The all-consuming first person POV helps us keep the rose-colored glasses on, even while noticing the smudges on the lens. He’s getting texts from another girl with poems attached. Useless when he’s not around, going as far as to wish for tragedy so that he’d come to her rescue and take care of her. Arguing about who she hangs out with like a real couple. Most of this is a reflection of Rodrigo’s behavior and perspective. While she is hyper-fixating on every event in the relationship and how it feels, the lover as a character remains strangely abstracted. I interpret the lack of characterization of the beloved as evidence of the narrativizing taking precedence over the ability to be certain in her relationship. And further, the narrative of her love is bigger than the man himself.

I am not trying to say that the object of Olivia’s affection (or any man) isn’t worthy. It’s more that—just like in Romeo and Juliet that Juliet is the better sonnet writer, her iambs are perfect and precise whereas Romeo’s lines clumsily elide—women are able to make material out of less because there are real stakes in doing so.³

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About a year and a half in, I was sidelined by anxiety, fear, and a scarcity mindset. All that I want is to know undoubtedly that you only have eyes for me. We were reaching the dreaded post-honeymoon phase. Make it or break it. If we argued, I was sure that there was something wrong, much deeper than we could see. Not only was I hurting, but now there was a potential for even greater pain if we didn’t work out. Let’s just go to bed or something / Maybe it’ll fix itself tomorrow.

You were confused over my feelings, especially compared to your own. Your evaluation of our relationship was that everything was fine, if not perfect. I struggled in the gap between our experiences. They say it’s a virtue to not let good love slip away. Couldn’t you see how our attachments were different and for some reason this tore me at my seams? A feeling of disconnect when we were apart that I tried to ignore. I went to the doctor and she said I was fine. Why couldn’t the world building we’d done together be enough to convince me I was secure? Staring at the ceiling, can’t describe the feeling / searching my symptoms / lately I’ve been spiraling.

Even as the narrative shifted, even as I spiraled, I was still at the helm. I couldn’t understand why something was wrong when everything was so right. I wanted you more than anything. I knew the story I wanted to tell.⁴

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Precarity is one of the drives behind narrativizing. Much like the way men can’t shake off the socialization that has not prepared them to share readily, women can’t help but fear what society has drilled in us, too. That to be unattached to a man, even in today’s supposedly evolved society, means to have one’s value reduced.

In sociologist Eva Illouz’s The End of Love⁵, the author explores all the ways a relationship can end. In a chapter on freedom and its limitations, Illouz includes a quote from one of her interview subjects on the “cost” of breakups. “This woman expresses in a painfully articulate way the fact that relationships are exited at will, easily and with no serious symbolic or moral cost for the person exiting [sic: is why] she feels like a disposable commodity, tried on and thrown away, or using her metaphor ‘put back on the shelf.’”

Illouz credits women with prompting the evolution of marriage from an economic structure to an emotional one. The greatest achievement is emotional intimacy, not financial security. A study Illouz cites has 80% of surveyed women valuing a man’s ability to be emotional over his ability to provide. However, that achievement also comes with a cost. Because of this shift, marriage becomes more “uncertain.” Losing emotional intimacy would mean losing something immensely valuable and safe. For a relationship to work, intimacy depends on “the voluntary disclosure and expression of emotions of two people.” Yet time and again, I speak with friends who lament their partner’s hesitancy to open up.

My women friends and I are extremely forthright about what we’re feeling. We don’t wait until the other person asks what’s going on. We just tell each other, often in extreme detail. I have sat on couches for hours evaluating, analyzing, and piecing back together the emotional complexities of my friends’ interior worlds. Illouz validates this, in that “Heterosexuality organizes inequalities in an emotional system that places the burden of success or failure in relationships on people’s psyche, mostly women’s … Men and women, but mostly women, turn to their psyche in order to manage the symbolic violence and wounds contained in such emotional inequalities: Why is he distant?”

For many men, relationships—not just romantic—take up a lot less space in their heads than for women. This is not a novel observation. They do not need to narrativize a relationship because their value is not perceived as compromised if the relationship ends. To paraphrase a sentiment relayed to me by a friend from Lena Dunham’s Famesick, when a man loses a woman, it is chalked up to a fumble, but when a woman loses him, it’s an opportunity for a character evaluation.

Women fill in the emotional gaps with grand sweeping narratives because these, historically and presently, grant us some power. Even when these narratives come to hurt our feelings and make us question who we are in and out of love. Men have never had to give their whole selves in sex, Illouz argues, based on a whole prehistory of women having to rely on sexual relations to secure their place in society, whether this is through procreation or sexual commodification. This remains true, even as sex has become more casual and emotions more alienated despite a bevy of modern psychotherapies.

It hurts to be in a deficit. It also hurts to recognize how a man’s behavior may be impacting you more than yours does him. It’s annoying to be wrapped up in constant analysis. There are very real psychic wounds too, even in healthy relationships. All of this feels disempowering, so of course trying to build out our toolkit of defenses is one method of coping that at times helps, and other times just hurts more.

As Illouz writes, “Women [bear] the main psychological burden of coping with [the devaluation of their bodies and selves] by using, for example, self-help literature or seeking psychological advice.” Hence the joke that we can fix him, with the implication that we are already healed. Armed with our supposedly evolved selves, we seek further counsel in our friends, try to puzzle together every subliminal message and mixed signal into a narrative where we don’t lose the guy in the end. However, this fixation often leads to the harrowing emptiness and ruthless self-denigration that Olivia Rodrigo so fearlessly depicts on Side B.

Another moment from Madame Bovary: “But on whom could she pin the responsibility of her unhappiness? Where was the extraordinary catastrophe which had turned her life upside down? She raised her head and looked about her, as though seeking the cause of all her suffering.” She couldn’t find it. Flaubert’s implication that she may be the cause, but Illouz and I would venture it’s not as simple as a psychological deficiency. Rather, it is a culture that has made gendered relationships one of inequality, and assigning moral failure to the woman should the relationship not succeed. It is also the fixation on the discovery of the true self as a form of liberation and freedom, but is actually most damaging in our ability to be whole with others.

So what if it’s not the psyche that needs to be fixed? What do we do with socialization that continuously relegate us to systems that we can identify as oppressive and yet we can’t help but continue to follow the narrative?

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Last summer, watching Lena Dunham’s new show Too Much we talked about how people tend to think their love story is singular, when in reality, the plots are identical. I admitted how in the beginning I too had pumped up the drama of our courtship a little out of proportion. What had gone on between us—the flirtation, the uncertainty, the eventual decision to be together—was surprisingly normal. You told me you were relieved to hear me say this. I crumpled. Maybe there was a part of me that wanted you to contradict me. To tell me our love story was one for the ages.

It isn’t. Or at least, it isn’t particularly singular. This is a good thing. You’d later write in my anniversary card that our love was monumental, but what you meant was that it was monumental for us. It was a watershed, but for us. To have a singular love story would mean inviting dramatic tension or stakes that would make for something unsustainable. Further, to have a love story good enough for a TV show would mean the plot had already been written. It would mean it wasn’t real.

As the seasons of our relationship progressed, I began to understand that our story was just our story, one that resembled countless other love stories. Everything I own just feels like ours. Ours, and every other girl and boy who’d fallen helplessly in love.⁶

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Rodrigo discovers in “the cure” that it is the self that gets in the way of love. Why can’t it ever be enough? Why can’t you come stitch me up? All because my head is full of poison and my heart is full of doubt. Rodrigo understands something is preventing her from actually losing herself, to being able to achieve the highest state of love. This isn’t solely her fault; rather, as she comes to discover on the back half of the album, it is the problem of two selves that can’t merge.

Rodrigo acknowledges that it’s not completely in her head; or at least, it takes two to sink the ship. On “what’s wrong with me,” she uses an extended metaphor—a litany of health problems—to diagnose her lovesickness. The manifestations of these symptoms are both thanks to her mind and the beloved. From many lyrics on the second half of the album, it’s clear the beloved has a heavy hand in her misery.

Modern relationships are plagued with hesitance from both people to submit to each other and let go of the uncertainty that promises self-realization outside of relationships. The higher ideal is one that Rodrigo pines for throughout the album, if only she and the object of her affection could get out of their own ways. She gets close to this on the revisionist “purple,” which was originally written when she was enmeshed in love, but then revised after the breakup to show the danger of becoming too entwined.

So this is how a narrative becomes a way to protect yourself. If you know how the story is going to end, then you won’t lose yourself.

I’d argue the sadness a woman feels in a relationship has to do with narrativizing. Women turn to narratives to determine their importance, their singularity. Otherwise, if we forget ourselves completely in a relationship and feel everything there is to feel, we still may end up alone without value. Why should it be any surprise that women may yearn for grander narratives?

This is why an album like Rodrigo’s can offer a reminder that our stories are the same. This is a good thing. Yes, love can be grand and romantic. Love stories exist to remind us that real life also exists. Possibility exists. The grand narrative means there’s an imaginative, creative force behind love. That is worth holding onto.

We don’t have to let go of our narratives. Some amount of narrative brings certainty in the choice you made to be with someone. But to hold onto these might mean letting go of the uncertainty that promises self-determination and capital-influenced freedom. Instead, certainty can show us how freedom can be found in love, and just how good it feels to let go of the self.⁷

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The party has started to clear out. She asks multiple variations of whether you think he’s serious about her, or if he’s just stringing her along. She has already identified the two possible outcomes of the story. In any case, whether it’s him or someone else, the memories will go dark. The story will begin again. Everybody changes, but there’s always the hope that they don’t. Here’s to hoping.

You envy her slightly. Sometimes you wish you could go back to the beginning and live it all again. The way it felt to be suspended in the uncertainty. Buzzing, drowning in ecstasy, mind at the end of a wire. But that would mean you would not be where you are now—a girl so in love.⁸

“drop dead,” music video, dir. Petra Collins (2026)

1. If you jumped down here, I just want to say that obviously this dynamic can exist within same gender and non-cis relationships. What I aim to write about here, however, is the particular way that heterosexual couples tend to possess divergent narratives about the lived experience of the relationship. Mostly, I venture this is a result of romantic relationships transitioning from economic institutions into emotional ones at the surface while unconsciously remaining tied to the former thanks to capitalism’s chokehold on all relations.

I will admit I am purposefully caveating: there will be somewhat of a gender essentialist lens applied to this essay, which seems appropriate given my romantic history as well as the heterosexual relationship at the center of Rodrigo’s album, and the meditation on “narativization.” I understand that relationships between men and women, too, can have more nuances than what I analyze here.

2. Italicized sentences are lyrics from: “drop dead,” “stupid song,” and “purple”

3. Italicized sentences are lyrics from: “maggots for brains” and “purple”

4. Italicized sentences are lyrics from: “begged,” “less,” and “what’s wrong with me”

5. Throughout the essay, I pull ideas and quotes from Eva Illouz’s The End of Love and Why Love Hurts. Both are worth more inquiry and in-depth analysis than I perform here.

6. Italicized sentence is a lyric from “honeybee”

7. Italicized sentences are lyrics from: “the cure”

8. References to “cigarette smoke,” “honeybee, and “u+me=<3” in this paragraph