Sidney Sweeney bring Scooter Braun To Stagecoach, I turned around in front of every phone in the desert, and left the rest to the Internet. Hard launch completed. Cowboy hats, hands in back pockets, the whole performance.
The Internet did what the Internet does. Power dynamics. Age gap. Public relations strategy. Someone has already written a take on what this means for their brand.
I’m not interested in any of that. I’m interested in what happens to two human beings when they decide to be seen together so loudly, so publicly, so quickly. Because I see this exact style coming into my office in San Francisco all the time, just without the festival photographers.
The goldfish bowl is real and changes the air in the room
This is the thing no one says out loud about a hard launch. We are wired to connect from cradle to grave. We are an interconnected species. The moment you were born a hundred thousand years ago on the African savannah, you needed someone good enough on the other side of your birth or else you would die. This biology doesn’t care about being a movie star. It runs the same software in Sidney Sweeney that runs in your accountant.
Now layer on the celebrities. Every step is monitored, judged, commented on, saved, shared, screenshotted, and archived. It’s a goldfish bowl, and there are two villages outside the glass, both with views.
In an environment like this, people rely on what I call protective personality strategies. One person I know well, both clinically and personally, is the seducer. When this part is running the show, your worth in love and life is entirely determined by whether or not someone wants you. Whether you can perform the desired version of yourself that you think you need to perform.
Launching hard with PDA at a country music festival is The Seducer in full bloom. It is a general, wonderful and completely human answer to the two questions that every couple always asks each other under the words: Are you there for me? Am I enough for you? When the cameras click, the answer seems like yes.
What no one warns you about the morning after launch
This is the part that gossip completely misses. Performative romance is not fake. It’s just early. What comes next is more difficult than ever.
I tell couples this all the time, and it makes them confused. Your sexy self has met your partner. Now your weak self must make love to them.
I have my own history with this. Much of my ego stability came from being seen as attractive, as desirable, as the seductive man in the room. I’m embarrassed now at how important that was to who I thought I was. The honeymoon phase of any relationship runs on this fuel. It feels electric because it is built on being chosen, being wanted, and being publicly claimed.
But the erotic self cannot sustain the relationship. If we don’t make space for the vulnerable self to be the one enjoying the intimacy, we will end up having no intimacy at all. The dynamic in which the desired personality remains while the actual heart hides is one of the most common patterns I see, and is one of the quiet motivations behind the science behind the signs a husband doesn’t want you sexually and hundreds of other “we used to be hot for each other, what happened” stories.
If you want to know the protective personality who runs your relationship when the cameras are off, you can get your free relationship assessment. Most people are surprised by the result. The seducer is just one of several.
The Internet wants bad guys. There are none here.
The cultural reaction with a couple like this is to diagnose someone. Does he use it? Is she using it? Is one of them a narcissist? Is the other naive?
I want to be very direct about this. This type of analysis is fast food. It’s the relationship aid equivalent of a bag of M&Ms for dinner. People want to consume it because it’s sweet, affirming, and gives you someone to blame. You will eat the whole bag. You will feel like garbage after that.
The story of the other never leads to growth. It never leads to healing. It is the path that the laboratory mouse discovers over and over again, where he eventually has no food.
So I won’t do that. Sidney Sweeney is not a caricature. Scooter Braun is not a caricature. None of you are a bad person, no matter what the internet says about your ten seconds of meme fame. You both make sense. There is a little child inside each of you searching for love and connection, just like the rest of us.
This is also why I’m not interested in policing what’s considered a “real” launch versus a “strategic” launch, in the same way I’m disapproved of when people focus on the science behind micro-cheating rather than the underlying bond. Behavior is downstream. The attachment is the story.
What I would actually say if they were on my couch
If this couple walks into my office six months from now, after the PDA photos have turned into projections and the first real fight has taken place, I’ll start normalizing what scares them.
Disconnecting is a feature, not a bug. If you love each other, you will scare each other. If you are important to each other, you will hurt each other. You weren’t fighting because something was broken. You were fighting because you meant so much to each other now that the stakes were real.
Then I will help them drop the shields. A seducer is exhausting to maintain. Beneath the launch, festival and brand images of the couple, there is a little boy and little girl inside each of them, terrified of abandonment, terrified of not being enough.
Action moves from self-protection to mutual harmony. Compassion for oneself and compassion for the other person at the same time. I call it the empathy box. This is what builds a bond that can survive the goldfish bowl.
The line is worth saving
The hard launch is the easy part. Anyone with a publicist and a festival ticket can do the hard launch. The soft, slow, unglamorous revelation of the actual self underneath, the one with the fears, the history, the parts that aren’t camera-ready, that’s true release. He never makes pictures.
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Couples Therapist Figs O’Sullivan is a couples therapist and relationship expert on the Stars and Silicon Valley, founder of Empathi, and built Figlet, our AI relationship coach, an AI relationship coach trained in his clinical work.
