5 Most Romantic Moments From “The Summer I Turned Pretty” Finale
· Thought Catalog
Updated 6 hours ago, September 17, 2025
The Summer I Turned Pretty may officially be over, but it’s hard to believe that its impact won’t last at least a little longer.
After all, Conrad and Belly’s love story has made a place in people’s hearts, and just because there won’t be a new episode next Wednesday doesn’t mean it’ll be easy for us to move on. (In that way, maybe we are all Conrad.)
So instead of focusing on what will fill the void during the coming Wednesdays of the year, I want to focus on all the beautiful moments we’ve been given in this series finale, thanks to Jenny Han, Lola Tung, and Chris Briney. May we all find a love as beautiful as Conrad and Belly’s—but until then, we still have these scenes to carry us forward.
“Have you moved on?”
Conrad asks Belly this as they dance by the Seine and Belly admits that she not only read all his letters, but that she’d reread them every time she felt lonely or sad. When he asks why it took her so long to write back, Belly admits she was trying to move on.
This is obviously painful for Conrad to hear, and he asks, “Have you moved on?”
Belly hesitates for a moment, reaching up to hold his face before kissing him and bringing him home with her—proving that no, she hasn’t moved on, either.
“Do you memorize every little thing I’ve ever said?” “Yes.”
This scene is a callback to the very first episode of the show, when Conrad is smoking a joint by the pool. When Belly called him out on it, telling him how unhealthy he had always said marijuana was, he asked, “God, do you memorize every little thing that I’ve ever said?” In hindsight, it’s clear that he was flirting with her, though Belly didn’t understand in that moment and deflected the question.
So when Belly starts smoking a joint in the finale, Conrad brings up the same things Belly had said in the first season, and Belly smiles. “Do you memorize every little thing I’ve ever said?” she asks, mimicking him. But instead of deflecting, he smiles and says, “Yes.”
Not only is the moment full of tension, but it’s also a full circle moment for the two—this time, Belly is the one flirting with a hopelessly infatuated Conrad, but Conrad no longer has any interested in deflecting. He’s ready to put it all out on the table for her.
“I dream about this. You.”
The scene where Belly and Conrad finally kiss and Belly takes Conrad home with her is romantic enough as it is, but when the music pauses for a moment, he looks at her and says, “I dream about this. You.”
Look, we’ve all probably known this to be true about Conrad. He hasn’t exactly been subtle about the fact that this is all he’s wanted all season. Still, there’s something gratifying about hearing him say it out loud to her, especially when, throughout the whole show, she’s always talked about dreaming of Conrad—she literally told Jeremiah in season two that Conrad was a dream to her. And for them to finally both have their dreams come true? Chef’s kiss.
“I’ve changed everything about myself, and the one thing that never changes is that I love you.”
Well, how’s that for a love confession? Of course, it’s not an easy scene to watch—in it, Belly questions their feelings for one another and whether or not they’ve simply been influenced by their situations. While it’s hard to hear her talk this way about her connection with Conrad, it makes a lot of sense for her character—after all, she just got out of a four year trauma bond with Jeremiah, where so much of their relationship was contingent on their grief. It makes sense that she would be afraid of making the same mistake.
But Conrad knows that his feelings haven’t been influenced by the grief of his mother, and this is what he has to say about that:
“I have tried everything not to love you for the sake of Jere, for the sake of not dragging you down with me in my grief. I have fought it way before the summer that my mom god sick. You’ve always been a precious person to me, I have always cared about you, and then at some point, I started to see you differently. And that scared me, because, you know, I didn’t want things between us to change. But the way that I feel about you, Belly, has nothing to do with my mom. If I met you for the first time tonight, I would love you.”
Though Belly is still uncertain, this is what she’s needed to hear all along—that he doesn’t need her, that what they have isn’t just something that’s been manufactured by circumstance, but that he has wanted her all along.
“I choose you of my own free will. If there are infinite worlds, every version of me chooses you in every one of them.”
Conrad really shined with his love confessions this season, so it’s nice that the final (and perhaps most epic) one comes from Belly herself. After years of back and forth, after claiming to him once that their relationship never mattered, she’s finally the one putting her heart back on the line.
This is also a really big moment for Belly, who has claimed in the past that she couldn’t help her feelings for Conrad and who has stated more than once that she “chose” Jeremiah. She is finally able to integrate those two concepts—the idea of loving someone irrevocably and love as a choice—and realizes that for her, Conrad is it. He’s the one she has always loved, and he’s the one she’ll always choose. It’s not about what she believed as a little girl, and it’s not about what she thinks she should do. It’s simply her acting authentically and following her heart back to the person she loves.