P.S. I Still Love You

“She leans forward and puts her hand on my knee. With a meaningful look she says, ‘Just be easy with his heart is all I ask.’”

Peter’s mother is warning Lara to go easy on her son: a warning that might seem unfair to the reader at first, given how much more power and experience Peter seems to have. Still, one lesson that Lara Jean learns over the course of the novel is that she has more power and agency than she realizes, and she is capable of hurting, as well as being hurt.

“Oh no. This isn’t how it was supposed to go for them. They were supposed to get back together, like Peter and me.”

Lara Jean is surprised and upset that her older sister Margot has not had the same cheering encounter with her off-and-on boyfriend that she has just had with Peter. This is partly because she now feels constrained from sharing her happiness over Peter with Margot, and partly because she looks up to Margot and wants to follow in her footsteps. She must learn the difficult lesson that romantic love is one area in which everyone is on their own, and different couples can react differently to similar circumstances.

“I don’t understand what’s the matter with Josh. He acted like he was so in love with her; he practically went into a depression when she was gone. And now this?”

Lara Jean is a social character who is affected by the people around her; even by Josh, her next-door neighbor and Margot’s boyfriend. She is bothered by his unpredictability and by the distress that it causes her older sister even though Lara Jean herself is capricious and unpredictable when it comes to romance, as we learn over the course of the novel.

“You can’t be close to someone, not truly, with secrets in between you.”

Lara Jean is referring to a fling that she had with Josh while Margot was away at school in Scotland; she is relieved that she has confessed this fling to Margot. However, her experience with Peter and Genevieve teaches her that, while secret-keeping is bad—and certainly cheating and sneaking around is bad—people are also mysterious and unknowable and love always involves a leap of faith.

“Gulp. ‘I promise I’ll be careful.’ But I’m not sure I even know what that means. How can I be careful when I already like him so much?”

Margot is not the only character in the novel who advises Lara Jean to be careful around love, so does Stormy, her friend in the nursing home who is very different temperamentally from Margot. If anything, Lara Jean is overly careful already and must learn to be less so. She must also learn that while people can offer empathy and solidarity around love, no one is an expert on it or has the perfect advice.

“I text back yes, exclamation point. Then I delete the exclamation point for sounding too eager. Though without the exclamation point, the yes seems completely unenthused. I settle on a smiley face and press send before I can obsess over it further.”

Lara Jean is a teenager who is used to social media, which does not mean that she is always comfortable with it (or incapable of being victimized by it). This quote shows that while text messaging may appear spontaneous and casual, it can be just as self-conscious an affair as regular letter-writing, especially when it comes to dating.

“We were two people pretending to like each other, pretending to be a couple, so now what are we? And how might it have unfolded if we’d started liking each other without the pretense? Would we have ever been a couple? I guess we’ll never know.”

Lara Jean cannot escape a feeling that she and Peter somehow became a couple under false pretenses (this quote refers to events from To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the prequel to this novel). While it is true that the beginnings of their relationship are unconventional, it is also true that Lara Jean’s obsessing over their beginnings is a general expression of her insecurity and her feeling that she has tricked Peter into being with her. She does not yet understand that there is no normal, standard way for a relationship to begin.

“I might have made out with him in a hot tub, but there wasn’t anyone around to see. Also, I kind of just want to watch the movie. I lean forward to take a sip of soda, but really it’s just so I can subtly move away from him.”

One challenge that Lara Jean and Peter face as a couple is that he is more sexually experienced than she is. This makes her insecure and wary and makes her see even a casual touch from him as a demand. This quote also shows Lara Jean’s brand of prim independence and her desire to maintain her freedom and privacy even while being a part of a high-profile couple.

“I’m not someone who climbs into hot tubs with boys and sits in their laps and kisses them passionately with a wet nightgown clinging to them. But I was that night. The video just doesn’t tell the whole truth.”

One difficulty of social media, as this quotation shows, is the way in which it can simplify people and turn them into types; in this case, Lara Jean fears that she will now be perceived as the promiscuous, rebellious type because of a video that has been made of her and Peter making out in a hot tub. Lara Jean also understands that no one is one single thing, even girls like her friend Chris who adopt a provocative style and seem to flaunt their rebellious promiscuity.

“I nod, even though I know he can’t see me. Peter is powerful. If anyone could fix such a thing, it would be him.”

Lara Jean has faith that Peter will “fix” the hot tub video situation, partly because he is popular and influential and carries himself with swagger and confidence. She also believes in Peter because he is her boyfriend, and she invests him with a superior worldliness and competence in a way that she has been socialized, as a woman, to do. In fact, the person who ultimately removes the hot tub video from the internet is Lara Jean’s mild-mannered father.

“This is what Margot was talking about, this double standard. Boys will be boys, but girls are supposed to be careful: of our bodies, of our futures, of all of the ways people judge us.”

Lara Jean finds that she is getting the brunt of people’s derision, as well as their unsolicited advice concerning the hot tub video; people have said relatively little about it to Peter. This is partly because Peter is more popular than she is, but it is also simply because he is a boy and thus immune to slut-shaming. She must struggle not to allow the power imbalance between them to affect their relationship.

“He isn’t used to being the butt of the joke. I suppose I’m not either, but only because I’m not used to people paying this much attention to anything I’m doing.”

While Peter has more outward confidence than Lara Jean, she discovers that his confidence is fragile and that she must frequently reassure him. She has a resilience that comes from being used to being on her own, and she is therefore better-equipped than Peter is to being at the center of a scandal.

“And I’m thinking of Mrs. Duval, of what she said before. She would probably lump Chris in with the party girls, the girls who sleep around, the girls who aren’t ‘better than that.’ She would be wrong. We’re all the same.”

Lara Jean understands that all girls want to be loved and valued, even girls like Chris who adopt a carefree party girl persona. She rejects the simplistic categorizing of adults like Mrs. Duval, who believes that there are girls who are deserving and girls who are not. This quote shows how teenagers can sometimes be wiser than adults, even or especially those adults who are supposed to guide and shepherd them.

“‘Spooning’s the freaking best,’ he sighs, and I wish he didn’t say it, because it makes me think of how many times he must have held Genevieve just like this.”

Lara Jean is upset by Peter’s remark about spooning because he is talking about it as if it were a sport: an activity that he could do with anyone. She wants to be reassured that it is special because he is doing it with her. Peter is a sincere character, but occasionally a clumsy one, who (in spite of his success with girls) does not always understand the nuances of courtship and what girls like Lara Jean want to hear.

“‘Excellent!’ she crows. ‘I’m so relieved you have some bite to you. A girl with a reputation is so much more interesting than a Goody Two-shoes.’”

Stormy is an adult in Lara Jean’s life who has a slightly different perspective on her hot tub video than do the other adults around her. This is perhaps because Stormy—as well as having had an adventurous youth of her own—comes from a different generation than the other adults in Lara Jean’s life. Stormy shows how the 1950s were in some surprising ways a more tolerant time than the present, even if the image of the 1950s is one of conservatism and hypocrisy.

“Daddy is only in his early forties. That’s still plenty young enough to meet someone and fall in love, two or three times over, even.”

Many of the adults in Lara Jean’s life, her father included, are single and are still figuring out their love lives as much as her peer group is. This gives Lara Jean an unusual perspective on the impermanence of love; even if, in the case of her father, it also gives her a desire to manage his love life for him.

“I do know the thrill. I remember it perfectly, and I would even if it hadn’t been caught on camera.”

Talking to Stormy about sex and love is refreshing for Lara Jean and serves to restore her own private feelings to her. Because Stormy is so distant from the world that Lara Jean lives in—especially the world of social media and constant camera exposure—Lara Jean does not experience the censoriousness and judgement with her that she does with other adults (and other teenagers as well). She can inhabit her own body again instead of constantly worrying about what her body looks like and how it is perceived.

“‘Feminist?’ Stormy makes a disgusted sound in her throat. ‘I’m no feminist. Really, Lara Jean!’”

Stormy has been giving Lara Jean what sounds like feminist advice, about valuing and protecting herself as a woman, but Stormy recoils from the actual word “feminist.” She thinks of herself more as an individual and seems to dislike labels in general. It is a moment that shows the generation gap between the two women, as well as the power of certain words.

“For the first time he doesn’t kiss me goodbye, and it makes me feel guilty, how bad he feels. It’s partly my fault, I know it is. He feels like he has to make things right for me, and now he knows he can’t, and it’s killing him.”

Lara Jean is right about the pressure that Peter feels to protect her from the video scandal, a pressure that is very traditionally masculine. She is wrong, however, to feel guilty; in fact, Peter is arguably more responsible for the scandal than she is, since it was his ex-girlfriend who made the video (a fact of which he is, moreover, aware). This quote shows how hard traditional gender roles can be on a couple, and how such roles can obscure more complex feelings and realities.

“This is random but do you remember how he always used to take the last piece of pizza? So annoying.”

This excerpt is from a letter that Lara Jean writes to John. She is writing to him about Peter here, with whom she is, at the moment, disillusioned and angry with. John further serves to put Peter in an unflattering light, being a very different kind of boy from Peter. Even so, the fact that Lara Jean cannot constrain herself from mentioning Peter to John—even if it is only to gripe about him—shows her ongoing preoccupation with Peter.

“Is there even a difference between texting and letter writing? One is more immediate. But the act of writing a letter, of selecting paper and pen, addressing the envelope, finding a stamp, let alone putting pen to paper…it’s far more deliberate.”

John’s old-fashioned deliberateness is one quality that Lara Jean values about him and makes him seem both different from Peter and more like Lara Jean. Even if John is better at courtship than Peter is, it is still somehow Peter whom Lara Jean ultimately prefers. John’s skill at courting her does not add up to his being the ideal boyfriend for her, perhaps because there is no such thing as an ideal boyfriend.

“There was this one time I looked out the window and saw that John McClaren was up in the tree house alone. He was just sitting by himself, reading. So I went out there with a couple of Cokes and a book and we read up there all afternoon.”

The intimacy that Lara Jean shares with John is different from sexual intimacy but is a real form of intimacy, nevertheless. It is the intimacy between two private, bookish people who can let down their guards around one another, and as such, it is perhaps rarer than sexual intimacy. Lara Jean must nevertheless learn to distinguish between love and close friendship and recognize that her feelings for John and Peter are different.

“She can’t be trusted, not in this game. I should have remembered that. It’s why I always lose; I don’t look down the line far enough.”

One reason why Lara Jean wants to win the game of “Assassin” is because she wants to prove herself a wily and resourceful adult. She believes herself too naïve and vulnerable and wants to show that she is as hard as someone like her ex-friend Genevieve; she also wants to triumph over Genevieve herself. One thing that she finds out, however, over the course of playing the game, is that everyone is vulnerable, even or especially those people like Genevieve who put on a tough and worldly act.