You Will Always Be Known as the Girl Who Didn’t Go to Paris By Michaela Schwartz

The Summer I Turned Pretty, Dawson’s Creek, and The Big France Decision

*Spoilers ahead for TSITP Season 3 (through episode 7) and mildly for all of Dawson’s Creek*

In 2025, Belly Conklin just received some amazing news. That study abroad program in France she was waitlisted for? She’s off the waitlist. A dream come true! But, there’s this boy...

In 1998, Joey Potter just received some amazing news. That study abroad program in France she was waitlisted for? She’s off the waitlist. A dream come true! But, there’s this boy...

The Summer I Turned Pretty (airing on Prime Video) follows Isabel “Belly” Conklin over the summers she spends with her family: her mom, Laurel, and her brother, Stephen; and with Laurel’s best friend, Susannah, and her two sons: Jeremiah and Conrad. As Belly and the boys grow up, they must cope with all of the complexity that young adulthood adds to their friendships. Dawson’s Creek, which aired on The WB from 1998-2003, similarly deals with coming-of-age amongst a close-knit friend group: Joey Potter, her best friend (and childhood crush) Dawson Leery, their goofy, sarcastic friend Pacey Whittaker, and the new girl from the big city, Jen Lindley. 

The Summer I Turned Pretty is a Dawson’s Creek reincarnation in more ways than one. Joey and Belly, our young female protagonists, both begin their series with the startling revelation that the boys around them are going to treat them differently now that they’re becoming young women. Both set in fictional Cape Cod towns (but filmed in North Carolina), these teen dramas are often reduced to The Big Love Triangle: Which boy will she choose? Conrad or Jeremiah? Pacey or Dawson? (Yes, that order is intentional. I am a firm believer that Conrad is the Pacey and Jeremiah is the Dawson analog. Feel free to disagree, but you’d be incorrect.) However, these love triangles often serve as externalizations of deeper internal conflict brewing beneath the surface. Belly and Joey are choosing far more than a boy to kiss. The decisions they make may not be the ones we would choose for them, but by taking their interior worlds seriously, we might be able to unlock some more care for ourselves in the process. 

Who you choose to spend your time with, who aligns with your values, how you let your friends and partners make you feel - these are all huge decisions. Often teen girls are seen as frivolous for reducing themselves to a girlfriend, a prize to be won between boys. While I do agree that we should invest in more diverse and expansive representations of the teenage experience on television, we also need to recognize that a lot of that reduction is happening outside of the shows themselves. Yes, Belly and Joey are often centering their love lives in their own narratives. Through their adventures in romance, however, they are also exploring classism, friendship, education, family conflict, and many more aspects of growing up. It’s an endless feedback loop: the industry offers love triangle narratives to teens, the teens consume the content made for them, the teens are made fun of and looked down upon for consuming the content made for them. 

What would happen if we simultaneously stopped reducing girls to their romantic decisions while also recognizing that those romantic decisions are far more complex and interesting than we often give them credit for? We could delight in watching #TeamConrad edits on TikTok and see Belly for the full-fledged character she is. 

Enter: the France Decision. Both Belly and Joey are offered a dream come true, a semester abroad in France, just as their love lives are coalescing in a major way. For Belly, her childhood-best-friend-turned-boyfriend, Jeremiah, has just proposed to her after her brother is in a major car accident. In Dawson’s Creek, Joey and Dawson have finally, after years and years of dancing around the issue, kissed, forever changing the trajectory of their friendship. Things are happening! 

Both Jeremiah and Dawson are initially supportive of our protagonists heading overseas. When Belly tells Jeremiah her big news, he says “Bells, will i miss you? Oh like crazy. But Paris is your dream and I want all of your dreams to come true because you deserve it.” And Dawson, despite his clear internal hesitation (and after a quick quip that he would take his own life “something painless, you know. Pills, car fumes maybe”), assures Joey “If Paris made you happy...then I’d be happy for you.”

Somehow, however, over the course of an episode or two, both Joey and Belly decide, on their own accord, not to accept their offers. And while there are multiple smaller factors leading them to these decisions, it is clear that The Boys are their main motivations for staying behind: 

BELLY: If it’s this hard to say goodbye to you for 5 days, how am i supposed to leave you for 5 months?

JEREMIAH: You mean, for Paris?

BELLY: Yeah...When i made that decision it was before we got engaged, you know? Just feel like things are different now. I don’t want us to be separated right after we get married.

JEREMIAH: Are you sure?

BELLY: Completely.

JEREMIAH: Good. Cause I didn’t want you to go either.

BELLY: So I’ll stay.

DAWSON: How are you?

JOEY: [teasing] I don’t know Dawson, I think I might have made the biggest mistake of my life...France. I told Mr. Ellard I just wasn’t going to go. 

[smiles, giggles, huge hug]

DAWSON: So Joey Potter’s sticking around Capeside for some guy.

JOEY: Maybe, if you’re lucky, I’ll introduce you to him sometime.

DAWSON: Oh, ok. Well.. he’s a very lucky guy.

JOEY: But, seriously Dawson. What do you think?

DAWSON: I’m relieved I’m ecstatic. I’m psyched. 

Both of these scenes make me so upset. In the words of Vulture writer Kathleen Walsh (and Gilmore Girls’ Jess Mariano): “Jeremiah actually encourages Belly not to go to Paris for that semester when I was really hoping for a “WHY did you drop out of YALE?” sort of reaction.” I want Belly and Joey to go to Paris. I want them to surround themselves with people who encourage them to follow their dreams and take risks, not stay behind. 

The hopeless romantic in both Belly and Joey is choosing love; choosing to stay with this person in a time of uncertainty. They both want to give their relationships the best shot at success. Belly, in particular, really wants to make the “adult” decision and prove to everyone around her that she is serious about this partnership. There are plenty of adult romances out there that would play this decision as a grand, sweeping romantic gesture (see Rachel “I got off the plane” Green in Friends). But, since Belly and Joey are both young women, many onlookers, both inside of their respective shows and watching them on a screen, think they are making a huge, naïve mistake by prioritizing their relationship over an international experience.

To be clear, I am one of those onlookers. I think both Belly and Joey should get on the plane and leave these boys in the dust, and not just because I think they are the Wrong Boys. I want them to follow their dreams, take opportunities that push them outside of their comfort zones, meet new people. If I were their friend or sister or mother, I would pull out their suitcases and make them start packing. But, part of the beauty of watching these teen dramas (and TV in general) is witnessing the messy lives and sometimes terrible decision-making skills of these young women. It’s having compassion for the large and small mistakes they make, and maybe by extension, forgiving yourself for the ones you have made. To comfort the teenage girl inside of you who may have chosen the comfort of others over the pursuit of your own dreams. 

I’d love to say that watching Joey Potter, Lauren Conrad, Rory Gilmore, and so many others compromise their goals for a boy has prevented me from making similar mistakes in my own life, but it certainly has not. Now, as I watch Belly possibly make the same misstep (It’s not set in stone! There is still hope!), I am grateful that I am able to recognize it as the mistake that it is.

Life is long, and Paris will always be there. Making a wrong turn at 16 or 21 does change the direction of your life, but it does not mean your life is over. You may find yourself celebrating the triumph, like Joey at the end of Dawson’s Creek, of finally buying that plane ticket to France for yourself. 

Here’s to letting teen characters make the same messy, convoluted, irrational mistakes as the ones we expect from our adult characters. I don’t know exactly how The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 3 will end, or how closely we’re following the books, but I’m excited to see Belly be messy as hell and love her for it all the same. Whatever fictional Cape Cod town you choose to spend your summer in, Capeside or Cousins, I hope you can find compassion for the young girl on screen and the one inside who chooses to stay.