Sabrina Carpenter recently released her new album Short n’ Sweet and, as usual, talked about all these feminine feelings. “Lie to Girls“, for example, talks about how girls will do anything for love, including turning bad guys into incredible guys. That kept me wondering: why do we keep doing this? How often do we girls watch couples that have this distorted relationship and fall in love with them?
We can see it in TV shows and movies. For example, Carrie Bradshaw and Mr. Big (Sex and The City), Blair Waldorf and Chuck Bass (Gossip Girl), Lily Bloom and Ryan Kincaid (It Ends With Us)… All these girls keep lying to themselves and trying to find excuses to make their men the most perfect guys in the whole world. During the scenes they are cheated on, left alone, become the second (or last) choice, and much worse! After all of that, they still go back to them and try everything to prove their love when it should be the other way around.
All of this is because, at the beginning of the relationship, their men appear understanding and caring, displaying behavior almost like a mysterious prince, while women have various insecurities and a strong desire to be loved properly – something they manage to fulfill at first, until their partner reveal their true selves.
And of course, all of these fictional couples are so loved and shipped throughout the show; most of them are even endgame! But why do we girls love these couples so much? What makes us cry and root for them? Why do we settle for so little when we deserve more? Well, when Sabrina sings about this feeling, it’s as if we can finally understand why they and we keep doing that.
WHY WE KEEP DOING THAT?
Just as Carpenter says, we hold on to the good parts, to what made us fall in love; we make a bunch of excuses to deny what is in front of us. But it’s not just her, Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift also have many songs that talk about the same theme. In “This is what makes us girls“, for example, Lana shows how we put love above all. It brings the deepest feelings about how we just want to be loved the right way and would do anything to achieve that.
And in Taylor’s “Cardigan“, we hear about a girl who is cheated on in the summer and still loves the boy who did that. She keeps remembering their love story and even sings that, despite the hurt, he said she was his favorite. “Peter“, another one of her songs, offers a different perspective. There, she talks about how she tried to wait for the man she fell in love with and hold on to the good parts, but it wasn’t enough, and she needed to let go.
“Lie to Girls” shows how we choose to look the other way, especially in the part where she sings: “We love to read the cold hard facts and swear they’re incorrect / We love to mistake butterflies for cardiac arrest”. It’s like we’re on this rollercoaster that’s going so fast, and even if we get scared, we get off and say it was the best ride of our lives. After all, we wouldn’t want to admit that it actually made us nauseous.
Even Olivia Rodrigo talked about it in “Favorite Crime“. Right at the beginning of the song, she says: “I crossed my heart as you crossed the line / And I defended you to all my friends”, which is something that characters like Carrie and Blair do often. They always try to hide or convince themselves that they’re okay and that their boys didn’t do anything so twisted. As for Lily, she truly lies to herself, trying to make domestic violence seem like an accident and focusing on the good parts of the marriage.
BREAKING THE CICLE
But have you noticed that even though we do all this, we are always conscious of it? We lie, but we know we’re lying! After telling the lie, we feel sick, sad, and even depressed. We want to scream and convince ourselves that what we just told people – and ourselves – is true; but we certainly know it isn’t!
So, we watch Lily getting tired and leaving Ryan, Blair breaking up with Chuck after he chooses the hotel over her, or even Carrie, who always chooses Big, sometimes chooses herself. Therefore, even though some women do anything for love, it’s not every one of us that keep insisting in that situation.
While the music and film industry often emphasize this aspect, Sabrina and other artists manage to show the other side of the coin, revealing that we choose to continue with the lies until, at some point, we can no longer lie.
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The article above was edited by Giulia El Houssami.
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