sometimes i think back to the first time i watched to all the boys i’ve loved before: p.s. i still love you and i am always in a limbo of perceptions. on one end, that was a hella hot session but on the other, it was terribly unfulfilling for the stupidest reasons. like, that was the most active two hours of my life and yet look at where i am now. only able to look back at it and either be turned on or disgusted by the experience. can’t wait for the next time i get to do it with someone besides that person though.
Imagine it: Lara Jean, Bachelor franchise super-fan, records an audition video as a joke and then forgets about it. Kitty, meddling as usual, finds it on her phone and send it in to ABC. Usually the Bachelorette is last season’s Bachelor runner-up--at the very least, someone who’s been part of the franchise before. But Lara Jean hits some weird re-working moment inside ABC and they pick her, a total newcomer, and the franchise’s first-ever Asian-American star.
She goes in thinking she knows the deal, that she’s seen enough seasons of the show to separate the ones who are “there for the right reasons” from the fame-seekers and social-media types. It’s not hard, at first, to narrow down the handful of guys she can see herself feeling serious about. There’s John Ambrose, interesting and serious. There’s Kenny, who’s cute and fun and always makes her laugh. Lucas, who she has a sneaking suspicion might not actually be here for the same “right reasons” as her, but who she can really talk to--and who she decides to keep around for as long as the producers will let her. And then there’s Josh, the one she really gets butterflies when she thinks about. The one she gives the first-impression rose to and takes on the first one-on-one date.
It’s after that date, after she’s done a sit-down confessional and admitted that things with Josh already feel serious, that the producers take her aside.
“Look,” they say, “we need a little more mystery, okay? We know you like Josh, and that’s fine. But Peter K. is polling really well with the fans, and we’d like you to keep him around too. Take him on a one-on-one. See if you can make it look like you’re really considering him.”
It’s not like she doesn’t think Peter K., tall Peter with his dark, unruly curls and his quick smile, isn’t attractive. Or funny. It’s that, well, she’s been watching this show for as long as she can remember, and she knows he was on two seasons ago, when Gen was the Bachelorette. He was third runner-up, and he was devastated. You could tell it was real. Lara Jean already decided, when she signed the contract, that she wasn’t going to fall for a return contestant. She wasn’t going to be someone’s second choice.
“We’ll level with you,” the producer tells her. “We’re thinking of him for the next Bachelor, okay? So you need to take him at least as far as fantasy suites, and then you can pick Josh.”
That makes her feel a little better, at least--the knowledge that this is fake for him too, that they’re both getting something out of it. And it’s not like she really has a choice, anyway, so she decides to make the best of it.
The problem, though, is that the longer she keeps Peter K. around, the more roses the producers tell her to give him, the harder it is to maintain her emotional distance. So much about the show seems fake, all the time: the dinner dates on empty sound stages where they barely touch their cold food, the “surprise concerts” where she’s forced to act excited about a crappy band she’s never heard of before.
When she takes Peter on her mandated one-on-one, though, all of that suddenly fades away. It’s still fake, sure--both the sets and the set-up, the conceit that they’re both here to fall in love with each other and not because it’s the narrative ABC wants. But maybe she forgets all of that, just the tiniest bit, when Peter opens up about his dad leaving at dinner. That part feels real, so real that she talks about her mom without the producers guiltily prompting her. She wants to tell him about it, is the thing. It feels like he’ll understand--like he does understand, like he’s really hearing her.
After dinner, too, when he makes her laugh so hard whispering jokes into her ear while they’re pretending to slow-dance that they’re forced to re-shoot half the footage.
And after that, when he kisses her, and she forgets the cameras are even there.
It’s all kind of a muddle after that. It feels like her control over the season is slipping away, even when both she and Peter know that what they’re doing is a set-up. Is fake. It’s just that it’s harder and harder to remember that. She finds herself looking forward to the five minutes she’ll have to talk to him after a group date, meeting his eyes carefully during rose ceremonies, as though reminding herself that he’s still here.
She takes him on hometowns and meets his family, his mom and brother, and feels like she already knows them.
The next week is fantasy suites, the last week of her unspoken contract with Peter and the producers. She’s sad, and then relieved, because now she can just end it and focus on Josh and John Ambrose, the way she should have been doing the whole time. It’s not like she actually has to sleep with him, either--the show makes a big deal about fantasy suites for the fans, but she’s been consuming Bachelor-related tell-alls for long enough to know that really, what you do is just get a good night’s sleep in a nicer hotel room than usual.
That’s what she does with Josh and John Ambrose, and that’s her plan for Peter, too.
She doesn’t know what goes wrong along the way. Maybe it’s something about the date itself, the quiet snow-covered mountain with the sunset in the distance, the way Peter’s arm settles around her shoulders in the hot tub. When he leans in to kiss her for the cameras she lets herself fall into it, just for a second, and then it’s too late: his mouth warm against hers, the way his hands come up to cup her face. He brushes her hair back, then gathers it up and holds it out of the water.
“Let me,” he says, when she reaches for her scrunchie, and she can barely breathe while he gently winds her hair up into a messy bun and secures it.
“There,” he says, smiling at her, “it’s too cold for wet hair, Lara Jean,” and then she’s kissing him, and kissing him. She can feel his hands against her waist, under the water, the big span of them, and she shivers even in the heat of the tub.
He must be able to feel it, because he pulls back, concern on his face. “Whoa,” he says, “you okay?”
She nods, but she thinks for the first time that maybe she isn’t, not at all. When she reads Chris Harrison’s sappy letter to him after dinner, the one that officially invites them to use the fantasy suite together if Peter wants to, her voice trembles.
“As if I’d say no, Lara Jean,” Peter says, and he sounds serious, he sounds so real.
When the cameras are finally gone, when they’re in private--real private, for the first time since they’ve known each other--he sits across from her on the bed and looks at her carefully.
“So what do you wanna do, LJ?” he asks.
“Just--we can talk,” Lara Jean says, because she has a plan, and she’s sticking too it.
And they do talk. They talk all night, about high school and families, what it was like to meet his mom and how much she misses her sisters and her dad. About favorite movies, and her favorite things to cook. He asks her about that, about learning to cook her mom’s family’s food and she tells him about loving her dad and still feeling like he wasn’t always enough, sometimes, not when it came to things like that.
“I wish I could have met your mother,” he says to her, and she wishes that too, so fiercely it terrifies her. She kisses him so she won’t have to think about it, and when, minutes later, he pulls back to ask if she’s sure she wants to, she nods.
“I never thought I’d get this lucky,” Peter says to her, after, when she’s lying flushed on the sheets and he’s propped on one elbow looking down at her. She smiles and he kisses her again, gently, the warm weight of him like a promise above her. He runs a hand up her side and she leans into it, still wanting, and he answers.
Even when the producers wake them up in the morning, it still feels like a dream. She floats through her on-camera interviews, through the repeated shots of Peter bringing her coffee in bed. Her face hurts, a little bit, from smiling.
Maybe that’s what does it. Something must tip them off, let them know that she’s made her choice, whether she drops the word “love” on camera or not. They let her send John Ambrose home during the rose ceremony and then they pull her aside.
“We just want to make sure we’re on the same page here, Lara Jean,” they say to her. “Peter Kavinsky will be the next Bachelor, and he knows that too. We’ve even convinced Gen to come back as a contestant, now that she’s single again. It’s a whole new angle for the show, and we think it’ll play really well.”
It feels like being hit by a truck: she’s running along, and then she’s on the ground, aching, and she can’t breathe. The week is endless, miserable. All she wants is for the show to be over, to kick Peter off, to never see or speak to him again.
The proposals happen somewhere sufficiently exotic and beautiful, or at least Lara Jean assumes they do--she can’t focus on what’s around her, doesn’t care. All of her romantic fantasies seem worthless now. As though she really thought for a second that she might find love--love!--on this contrived reality show.
When she’s finally face to face with Peter, when she can tell him he’s not the one, she sticks to the script the producers approved. She can’t talk about what she really wants to, of course--her anger about Gen, the fact that all of it was fake, all along. Instead, she tells him that she thinks he still has feelings for someone else, and that she can’t be his second choice.
When she says that he looks confused, and when she keeps going, relentless, his face crumbles with hurt. She can feel the cameras moving in around them like sharks in the water, scenting tears like blood.
“You were never second best, Lara Jean,” Peter says, quietly, but it’s too late. It’s done.
She almost wants to laugh at the fact that they expect her to accept Josh’s proposal now--she hasn’t thought seriously about Josh in weeks, and when she turns him down, too, the producers fly into a frenzy.
“It’ll be dramatic, at least,” one of them says, finally, and then it’s over. The show is done.
She mopes around for three months, letting Margot and Kitty feed her and tease her in turn, until she feels mostly human again--just in time for the live finale show. There’s the flight back to LA, and then she’s sitting in the studio with Chris Harrison, fans surrounding them.
“Is it true that you didn’t watch the season?” Chris asks. “Not at all?”
“I couldn’t,” Lara Jean says, and the audience murmurs frantically.
“So then--you haven’t spoken to Peter K. since the show?” Chris asks.
Lara Jean shakes her head.
“Well, it’ll be an interesting night for all of us, then,” Chris says, and turns back to the screen.
Lara Jean is forced to watch it play out, the aftermath of her rejection. Peter does cry, it turns out. He cries angrily, like a boy who’s embarrassed about it but can’t stop himself, and he won’t talk to the cameras for a long time.
Finally they wear him down. When he turns to face the producers his face is red and blotchy, and his voice is hoarse.
“I really thought--” he pauses.
“I thought it was real,” he says, finally. “I thought it was real, that’s all. I guess I’m an idiot, right? It was real for me, that’s all I know.”
Chris Harrison is saying something to her, but Lara Jean can’t hear him. Her ears are ringing. It’s just that--no one’s that good of an actor, right? But it wasn’t real. It can’t have been. Like everything else on the Bachelor, it’s one big production.
And then doors open to the side of the stage and he walks out, Peter Kavinsky, pale and nervous and tall, so tall.
Lara Jean takes one look at him and everything that’s been holding up inside of her for three months collapses, and she can’t breathe. She can feel the room spinning around her, can hear Chris Harrison calling out for help.
And then Peter’s there, in front of her--above her?--one hand brushing the hair out of her face.
“Whoa,” he says, “Whoa, whoa, Lara Jean. You okay?”
She knows he’s mad at her, furious, he has to be, but all that’s on his face is sweet, anxious concern. His familiar face. The face she loves.
“I am now,” she says, and kisses him.
He’s frozen, her lips against his, and for a second she feels like an idiot--of course it’s not going to be fine, just like that, of course he was just saying what the producers wanted him to say--and then he’s kissing her back, warm and gentle, and real.
Really wanted to watch to all the boys I've loved before again, but not before reading the books so I just finished the three books within a week and now I'm rewatching the movie 👌👌👌
anyways i wanna watch to all the boys ive loved before but i also wanna read the books someone who watched the movie and read the books can you tell me if i have to finish the whole trilogy or if i can just read the first one
