Please Please Please

or, the inevitability of the motherfucker embarrassing you

Disclaimer: This post contains spoilers for season 2 of Netflix’s Perfect Match.

In the words of the great Sky Ferreira, “everything is embarrassing.” Nowadays, we like to joke about being jesters, clowns, silly little guys, rodents. We dress ourselves in ironic meme t-shirts and post about our failures on Close Friends stories. It’s like we share these vulnerable sides of ourselves in order to get it over with, before someone else exposes them for us.

With the release of her single “Please Please Please,” a twangy, Dolly Parton-esque plea to her lover that begs him to behave, Sabrina Carpenter has put into words a dark, restless feeling that looms large in the current dating environment — and I’m worried.

Carpenter, a fairly new pop star who rose to fame as the girl who dated Olivia Rodrigo’s ex and probably inspired Rodrigo songs like “drivers license” and “deja vu,” has stepped out of the shadow of that feud by releasing hits of her own. “Feather” drew ire from the Catholic church after its sacrilegious music video was filmed at Brooklyn’s Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Annunciation, and “Nonsense”’s famously raunchy outros, which Carpenter changes during every performance, even showed up on SNL. Solidifying her spot in the pop-girl canon, Carpenter responded to the Catholic church’s criticism with what can only be described as Icon Behavior: saying “Jesus was a carpenter” and calling it a day.

But nothing has been better for her career than the release of her song “Espresso” back in April, a wildly catchy bop that would be good on its own, but is bolstered by the inclusion of the year’s most ridiculous lyric, “That’s that me espresso.” I think we all remember where we were when we first heard it, maybe played it back to make sure we weren’t hearing things. On first listen, it sounds outrageous, something to roll your eyes at. But the more you absorb “me espresso” into your system, the more you let it sit and simmer, the more sense it makes. The song launched a million memes, and the only thing Carpenter could do to follow it up was release something that got people talking again — so she did.

“Please Please Please” is about Carpenter’s burgeoning relationship with actor Barry Keoghan, resident Saltburn bathwater-drinker, sart of like an evil porson, and poster boy for Hot Rodent Men everywhere. Much has been said about Keoghan’s bad behavior with his exes (including the fact that he allegedly left his baby mama for Sabrina Carpenter soon after his son was born), and Carpenter knows that her connection to him has the potential to make her look foolish. The song’s lyrics are a biting commentary on what’s happening to women who are trying to date in the age of ghosting, fuckboys, and infinite matches:

Please, please, please
Don't prove I'm right
And please, pleasе, please
Don't bring me to tеars when I just did my makeup so nice
Heartbreak is one thing, my ego's another
I beg you, don't embarrass me, motherfucker

Carpenter has tapped into the uniquely modern fear that women who date men are feeling more and more now: that they’ll get excited about someone with a lot of potential, maybe even fall for him, and then look like a clown when the man inevitably does something off-script. In those instances, it feels like we jinxed something, like if we had just reworded a text or worn a different outfit, it would’ve worked. We agonize over what we could’ve done differently, over what made us give a modicum of trust to that man in the first place. Men are no longer just treating us like shit or being careless with our time — they’re humiliating us, and everyone can see our asses.

This is why relationships (whatever the parameters of that word may mean to you) are so precarious, so “delicate,” as Taylor Swift managed to eloquently word it. We approach them with kid gloves. A few months ago, a friend of mine commented to a group of us girls that it feels like we have to treat men like stray dogs who are afraid to be pet. She put out her hand to demonstrate, calling, “Come here, it’s okay, come on,” in a high-pitched voice. We need to give them space, but not too much, in case they forget we exist. We can’t send the risky text, for fear of getting ignored completely. We have to go at their pace or no pace. And if we choose to ignore these unspoken rules and just be vulnerable and ourselves, we’re punished for that too, for coming on too strong or not being “casual” enough.

We can take comfort in this being a universal experience. If people like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter are afraid of being embarrassed by whoever they date, you and I have no chance of stability. That’s part of what’s concerning me, though — if even our hottest, most famous pop stars are complaining about being treated the same way that men treat me and my friends, what hope do we have of ever meeting someone normal?

My friends and I all seem to intuit that something sinister is going on with the apps — some glitch in the algorithm, maybe. The people we meet there do the same things to all of us, over and over, almost as if they’re being trained at some fuckboy facility where they’re waterboarded until they learn how to ghost you after making a million plans for you both and telling you they want you to meet their family or whatever. With the apps off the table, we’re forced back into the wild, where we’re looking to socialize with attractive, like-minded people without seeing their entire life in photos and stupid question prompts first. We want to approach people and talk to them, introduce ourselves, see how they react — at some point, someone has to respond normally. At some point, someone has to be the one.

Which brings me to another piece of media that’s been making me think of how we approach dating these days: Netflix’s addicting, melodramatic dating show, Perfect Match, whose second season recently concluded. Watching Perfect Match can sometimes be a surreal experience — people who look like nobody I know are running around a villa, preoccupied with finding a “match” for the night lest they get kicked out of the house without one. The women worry much more about whether or not one of these insipid fuckboys will want to match with them. They compete with each other for the men’s attention. For the most part, these women are kind, confident, and emotionally self-aware. The men come off as vapid clout-chasers who expect the women to fight over them. And they do! They compare themselves to the other women in the villa, the ones who are skinnier or more conventionally attractive or rock a revenge dress better than they do. These reality stars are supposed to be some of the hottest people around (according to American and British beauty standards, at least), and they’re still tormented by the fact that a random man in basketball shorts hasn’t “chosen” them.

It all comes down to that sentiment: the women need to be chosen. They crave it. They’ll scheme in order to get it. And much like in the real world, where relationships mean, essentially, that someone else has picked you, it’s not easy to get. The men of Perfect Match vacillate between matches, leading multiple women on at once in order to decide which option is ultimately their best. Sometimes, it blows up in their faces, but for the most part, it works out fine for them. The women put on their hottest, skimpiest outfits, spending hours giving themselves a full beat before venturing out to see the rest of the villa’s inhabitants, and the men essentially give off the vibe of “Oh shit, I forgot to pack a toothbrush.” They openly gaslight the women, a kind of dramatic irony that only the viewers at home can appreciate as we watch it play out.

The women, intuitive, sense the changes in behavior and confront the men, asking if something is wrong, if something is different. Of course not, the men respond, you’re my match. Meanwhile, we watch them push the boundaries with other dates while their matches back at the villa — the ol’ ball and chain — are none the wiser.

In this season’s most striking plotline, cheeky Harry Jowsey — who shot to fame on one of Netflix’s OG dating shows, Too Hot to Handle, and markets himself as a slutty, bad-boy reality star — attempts to reform his naughty ways. He’s gone to therapy, he says. He knows he has a problem. Harry vows to stop lying to and manipulating women, using therapyspeak to emphasize his turn from fuckboi to softboi. Once he begins dating Jessica, a fan favorite from Love Is Blind’s latest season, he almost has us convinced. The “couple” seems to absorb each other. Jessica is always on Harry’s lap, by his side, standing by her man. It’s like they’re living in wedded bliss — until Harry remembers he’s a reality star with bills to pay.

In a particularly savage challenge, the show sends all the men in the villa to a grotto to hang out with all the women who had been rejected at that point, women who were all staying at a hotel nearby, waiting for their chance to be called up to the bullpen. Obviously, they’re restless, they want to be on the show, and they’re bored of being isolated and matchless. They flirt with the men, the men flirt back. A chaotic chain of events plays out where some of the people at the grotto claim that they saw Harry kissing Melinda, another contestant. All this after Harry has sworn himself to Jessica for as long as he lives. Harry, unsure if the cameras have caught him in the act, scrambles to save himself, tries to gaslight both the other reality stars and the camera crew into believing they were conjuring drama out of thin air, that he’d simply been having a conversation with Melinda. You can see him trying to convince himself that what he’s saying is true.

When he gets back to the villa, he’s moody and mean, especially to Jessica. Anyone who’s been with a liar or narcissist knows the whole ordeal — the pouting, the martyrdom, the self-pity, the misdirected anger. Harry, positioning himself as the good guy, tries to “get ahead” of the gossip by apologizing to Jessica for behaving badly. He claims that he knows people will talk and that he doesn’t want her to find out from someone else. What he means by insinuating that his behavior was inappropriate at the grotto is anyone’s guess, since he doesn’t explain what he’s being accused of doing. Finally, he hangs his head in shame as he talks about everyone thinking he was flirting with Melinda, insisting that he wasn’t. He’s overblowing something that was the least awful thing he did that day, and he’s trying to manipulate Jessica away from the actual truth, which is…oh god, SO much worse.

Worst of all, Jessica decides to believe him. Or not believe him, but to let it go at the moment. She’s emotionally intelligent enough to know that he did something bad, that she probably doesn’t want to find out what it is, but she’s so excited by the prospect of this tall, handsome, famous man who has promised his heart to her that she develops selective hearing. No judgment, girl, we’ve all been there. When this happens in everyday, non-villa dating, we often choose to ignore the red flags in favor of someone’s (projected) potential, too, no? We know there’s something behind their slightly annoyed apologies, their “I just want to go to bed”s, their self-serving sobbing as they avoid confessing the truth.

Obviously, it blows up in both of their faces. When the Netflix crew finally decides to insert the covert footage from that day at the grotto, exposing Harry and Melinda’s actual rendezvous and conversation, it’s impossible for a dark cloud not to come over you, chilling you to the point where you wonder if you can ever trust another human being again. Because this stuff happens all the time, to all of us — cheating, lying, gaslighting — but this time, it’s been caught on camera. We watch Harry clearly betray the person he’s supposed to be in a “relationship” with in a variety of ways over the span of a couple minutes. Then we realize that he just spent the whole previous part of the episode claiming that he had done none of it. With horror, it dawns on us that at the time of filming, in the villa, Jessica only knows what Harry has tried to convince her is true. She won’t find out the real truth until after the show wraps. Despite all the precautions she tried to take as a single mother falling in love on a Netflix dating show, she’s been played. She knows that in order to take part in dating now, you risk looking like a complete fool.

So Sabrina Carpenter prays that she won’t unlock her phone one morning to a picture of her boyfriend kissing another woman on DeuxMoi. Jessica, armed with all the tools needed to build a healthy, mature relationship, doesn’t get a chance to use them as she wonders what her beloved daughter will think as she watches her mom get her heart broken on TV. Because in the end, you can have everything, you can be prepared for whatever, but you can’t control the self-destructive behavior of a man who’s gotten everything he thought he wanted.

Con mucho amor,

Kim