Here’s how Jenny Han is mastering the art of love triangles and young adult romances in 2025!

Jenny Han is the face behind some of our most beloved rom-com series today and here’s deep diving into her genius of it all!

Remember Peter Kavinsky and Lara Jean Covey from To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before? Remember how he came to be known as the internet’s boyfriend back in 2018 and she was what every girl wanted to be at that point? I went into that movie with not a lot of expectations but it turned out to be a film that was easy on the eyes and the heart! It was a sweet reminder that young adult romances weren’t gone after all! An entire trilogy and a happy ending later, we had two new actors to crush on and love songs stuck in our heads! Trust me, I will never be listening to ‘I Like Me Better’ by Lauv without thinking of this movie. Stemming from the world of To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before came XO, Kitty, focusing on Lara Jean’s younger sister, Kitty Song Covey. Set in Korea, the show honoured Korean and American cultures and blended the quintessential teen drama elements with a dash of K-drama in it. It had us wondering whether Kitty would pick Dae or Min-Ho. But that isn’t the only time we obsessed over picking teams!

With the last and final season of The Summer I Turned Pretty, all of social media is united like it’s the last season of Game of Thrones! Every episode, every scene is dissected into what it could mean for the future arcs to come. While women around the world pray for Conrad to get his girl back, what if I told you all of these stories are written by the same person? In a world where romance is at an all time low, Jenny Han is single handedly bringing them back and in her own style that the world just seems to get hooked on to! Not only has she struck the perfect balance between early 2000s teen shows and keeping it relevant with the times, she has also built a universe of her own that only her fans understand!

Also Read: Episode 5 of The Summer I Turn Pretty season 3 is for everyone who chose to be Team Conrad since day 1!

Here’s how!

She loves dividing us in two teams and to be honest, it’s what we’re here for as well!

There’s nothing like a good love triangle that has us hooked till the end to see who ends up with whom! While the endgame in a Jenny Han love story is pretty obvious, she does love putting in a third, equally desirable and good looking character to confuse us all and have the world conflicted over which one would be the suitable option after all! All debates aside, I don’t remember the last time there was this amount of hype for a show every single week and no matter how much we complain about Jeremiah, we know we love the drama!

She brought back yearning and black cat boyfriends!

There’s no form of love deeper than yearning for someone with all your heart. Characters like Conrad and Min-Ho are not only yearners waiting for the love of their life to come back to them, they’re also black cat boyfriends that the world seems to have forgotten! While we love a golden retriever lead who keeps his emotions on his sleeve, the black cat boyfriends who have their walls up and soften their edges only for their favourite girl, seem to be making a big time comeback and we’re not complaining! Also, the longer these characters yearn, the more it makes us want to see them together. We long for an episode every week just to see them in the same frame for even just eight minutes in an hour long episode!

Like a true Taylor Swift fan, she loves dropping easter eggs in everything that she’s ever made!

The easter eggs deserve a chapter of their own! In a Jenny Han story, nothing in frame is kept frivolously, everything has a meticulously planned reason to be there! She recreates iconic scenes from classic rom-coms we’ve grown up watching like ‘The Notebook’ and ‘Friends’. She builds her easter eggs from a Taylor Swift lyric. In season 3 particularly, we see Belly wearing either blue or red because as we know the songs goes ‘losing you was blue and loving you was red’ and hence the main character is always surrounded by these two colours either in the background or through their costumes. The poster in Belly’s room is Audrey Hepburn’s movie ‘Sabrina’ which is about the main character being stuck in a love triangle with two brothers, I mean the list of easter eggs can just go on and on and it blows my mind each time when I notice how thought through all of this is!

The soundtracks used for her stories often reflects what the characters are thinking!

Out of all of her works, The Summer I Turned Pretty is majorly known for its Taylor Swift songs describing what Belly is usually feeling, but come to think of it, she did the same with XO, Kitty as well! K-pop songs from popular groups like BTS, Blackpink and Twice, XO, Kitty and The Summer I Turned Pretty just represent two different spectrums of who Jenny Han really is! And because they are immensely popular songs in pop culture, it becomes way easier as an audience to connect with these characters. In the beginning of season 3, when Belly finds out Jeremiah has cheated on her, we hear ‘You’re Losing Me’ by Taylor Swift and up until episode 6 we don’t hear any Taylor Swift songs because Belly has stopped listening to her heart. In episode 6, when she has that intense moment with Conrad is when her heart feels alive again and we hear ‘False God’ playing for the second time on the show! Songs clearly have a huge role in her stories especially when she wants to communicate with her audience without dialogues!

She is inclusive of all kinds of sexualities in her stories without it looking tokenist!

Jeremiah from The Summer I Turned Pretty and Kitty from XO, Kitty are probably the only two lead characters in a mainstream American teen drama to be from the LGBTQIA+ community. Jenny Han does not limit her love stories to only heterosexuals, her characters aren’t afraid of exploring who they are even if we’re way deep into the story with them! It’s all pretty seamlessly done without it feeling too forced or too shocking of an arc to accept!

Her stories are always from the female lead’s POV and that’s rare even in a genre like romance!

She narrates her stories through Lara Jean, Kitty Song and Belly. They are who we put our faith in throughout the series. Whether we agree with everything that they do or not is a different story but they shine through in a frame full of people just like a Bollywood actress would fall in love in slow motion. A lot of their narrations feel like Jenny Han is writing a love letter comforting her younger self or probably thoughts that she has had as a teen! Her female characters are not only a ray of light for hopeless romantics like me but also teach us that young love is intense af!

With The Summer I Turned Pretty coming to an end soon, here’s hoping we get another romantic masterclass from her on-screen!

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