watch me party on you (but there's no party and there's no you)

"party 4 u" is lowkey a situationship anthem

I hate to join the crowd complaining just because Valentine’s Day came and passed like any other day, but romance just might be dead. My Tinder and Hinge matches are as dry as ever, and a semester of college didn’t bestow me a dreamy friends-to-lovers storyline, so I ended up doomscrolling in my bed on February 14. With the virality of Charli xcx’s latest album Brat last summer, it’s not shocking to see her older songs popping up on my FYP constantly. But in the lead-up to VDay, memorizing the “youcanwatchmepulluponyourbody” segment of “party 4 u,” a fan-favorite track from her pandemic-era album how i’m feeling now, only rubbed salt in my loveless wound.

Entering Spotify’s Viral 100 chart just last week, “party 4 u” is inspiring a TikTok trend of Coco Montrese-style lip-syncing, The Great Gatsby edits, and Bottoms’ kiss scene references, with many posts celebrating its popularity and comments lauding it as “the most romantic song of the generation.” This compliment is only ironic with one look at the lyrics.

Yeah, if you saw my tears, would you touch me?
Kiss me on the mouth, say you love me?
Leave a message, tell me you're sorry?
Hit me right back, hit me right back
Why you treating me like someone that you never loved?

Romance is literally dead if this one-sidedness is the ideal. The lack of reciprocation is even echoed earlier in the chorus when she repeats, “I was hopin’ you would come through,” implying her man never came to the party and never will — the song ends with her still waiting while he’s “somewhere far away.” Similar to The Great Gatsby’s main romance ending in tragedy yet still being exalted as an ideal relationship, the reputation that “party 4 u” has as a love song is greatly misleading. It paints the scene of a dwindling relationship failing to be repaired by a grand gesture. And what good is the elaborate party, the Grand Gesture, if the person you threw it for just doesn’t care?

With “party 4 u” soundtracking this year’s Valentine’s Day, it raises the question: why is Gen Z obsessed with tragic love?

I know we all want to believe ourselves to be unlucky hopeless romantics, but the dating trends of our generation make a good case against us: ghosting, rosters, and — lest we forget for a second before someone else drops another Substack post about their six-month talking stage — situationships.

Despite the lack of an official definition for the Internet-coined portmanteau, Urban Dictionary defines the situationship as “a romantic relationship that is, and will remain, undefined.” The rise of the situationship marks a shift in modern dating as the search for love moves online, aided by algorithms that constantly rescale the dating pool. With the rise of meeting on dating apps and sliding into the DMs on social media, Gen Z is left trying to turn the endless inorganic connections into one long-lasting relationship. With constant access to all types of romantic prospects comes the desire to appeal to as many as possible, dividing attention across many of those prospects and resorting to aesthetics and stereotypes to convey personality upfront. The assumption that one knows a person from what’s curated on their social media or dating profile leads users to bypass introduction and vulnerability, jumping straight into flirting. As a result, the ideal length for the talking stage becomes more and more unclear, and the concept of courtship, which encouraged explicitly defining relationship boundaries and labels, has long lost the IDGAF war, replaced with the want to be “chill” and “nonchalant” to the extent of total apathy. The result? High-risk, low-commitment relationships where people exist in limbo as both strangers and lovers.

This is to say I don’t blame anyone who just wanted to get to know a guy for two weeks and move on but instead got caught begging him to say “I love you” after two months of talking every night, planning honeymoon destinations, and naming your future children. The gesture of professing love to salvage a relationship always on the verge of ending — an Ouroboros of modern romance — is a sign of real emotional investment in these situationships, even without the formal commitment. These Grand Gestures act against the apathy, hoping to force a reaction that proves the time and effort invested were valued. And yet, these unlabelled relationships still end without the closure of a breakup.

If you really don’t relate because you’ve never been in a failed situationship, I know you’ve at least been on the receiving end of a friend’s rant about theirs, and you’ve probably had to validate their heartbreak was real heartbreak and their love was real love. Now if you relate to that, then I applaud you for listening as they passionately tried to explain the significance of their own Grand Gesture, however strange or personal or just down bad it was.

It’s actually no wonder Gen Z’s new favorite media of the moment are an elegiac love song that transforms throwing parties into its own love language, a book from 1925 about the consequences of changing your whole life for your wartime bae, and a queer satire that coincidentally plays “party 4 u” as the main character finally bags the cheerleader she co-started a fight club for. Despite the various outcomes — one of them literally being death — they all portray the Grand Gesture as a direct metaphor for the character’s desperation in their romantic pursuit. Like the size of Jay Gatsby’s parties and the lies behind Josie’s fight club, even the party’s extravagance in “party 4 u” (“one thousand pink balloons” and a “DJ with your favorite tunes”) is meant to show the extent of that desperation.

Complete with the search for one face amongst a crowd of people — akin to the wait for one text on a screen of other icons and conversations — the scene is all too familiar for Gen Z’s situationship victims. Here, there is no need for a label to want appreciation and reciprocation, and these pieces of media affirm both the want and the desperation are not only valid but also romantic. In clinging to “party 4 u” as one of the most romantic songs of the generation, we cling to the romance of investing in love, of loving someone with the intensity you crave in return.

So whatever — maybe the TikTok yearners are right, and romance isn’t dead. It just looks different.