Summer Romance

Summer loving had me a blast

Summer loving happened so fast

I met a girl crazy for me

Met a boy cute as can be

— John Travolta/Olivia Newton-John, "Summer Nights", Grease

Summer is a great time of year. It's hot and bright. It's great for an Empathic Environment of growing lust and physical closeness. People tend to be dressed in revealing and alluring ways. School (and in some cases work) is out, granting everyone far more free time to meet and/or spend time with other people without being occupied with other concerns, and normal rules tend not to apply, which also makes this a hallmark in the Coming of Age Story. May overlap with Road Trip Romance or be in summer camp, as the free time also means that one or both parties may be spending the holiday someplace they normally wouldn't be, giving them an opportunity to encounter someone they normally wouldn't meet.

There are two significant flavors to this trope. One is the temporary summer romance, which lasts for the summer before it ends, possibly due to the socioeconomic or physical distance between the two characters. If that's the case, summer will be plot-relevant in that the summer lack of routine brings the two characters closer together. It will likely be the Forever Fling, which, despite being temporary, will remain each person's benchmark for true romance.

The other is the permanent form of summer romance, where the romance begins in summer but goes on longer than that. The Fourth-Date Marriage will often begin in summer. This can either be the birth of a One True Love that spans the characters' lifetimes, or proof that happiness is temporary, and they get stuck in an Awful Wedded Life. As summer turns to fall and then to winter, it will mirror the progressive cooling of the characters' relationship, either as they break up or simply realize that love isn't all sunshine and rainbows.

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Daily Lives of High School Boys: Subverted in "High School Boys and the End of Summer", which has Hidenori grow closer and closer to a girl named Emi while spending the summer in his mother's hometown. She spends the whole summer trying to confess to him, but just as she's about to confess to him, Hidenori has something of his own to confess: they're cousins, ruining the romance.
• The Summer You Were There has this as part of its premise. Kaori Asaka proposes that she and Shizuku Hoshikawa date for the course of the summer vacation, making her proposal on the last day of class prior to the break. It turns out that Kaori doesn't expect to live past the end of summer. She turns out to be right, and passes away on August 29, near the end of the break.

Fan Works

• In the Ghostbusters (1984) fanfic It Was Written on Their Wrists in the Stars, there are several mentions of it being set during the summer, and the plot is a Love Triangle between Peter Venkman, Egon Spengler, and the nameless Original Character protagonist. There's also a secondary romance between two other original characters, Monica Gabarro and Michael Spence.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Addams Family sequel, Addams Family Values, a boy becomes instantly enamored with Wednesday while they're at summer camp together.
• Anyone but You: The entirety of Ben and Bea's romantic affair takes place in the summer in the Southern Hemisphere since they're in Australia during December.
• Played for horror and deconstructed in Berlin Syndrome. Claire meets Andi in Berlin while she's on vacation. The two of them have an extremely brief whirlwind relationship... at which point Andi locks Claire in his apartment. As fall and winter come, it mirrors Andy's escalating violence towards Claire and the risk to her life.
• Call Me by Your Name: Elio has a relationship with Oliver, who's working with his academic father, in the summer of 1983. It comes to a halt when Oliver gets engaged to a woman in fall or winter.
• Dirty Dancing: Takes place in the Catskills in the summer of 1963 where sheltered daddy's girl Frances "Baby" Houseman loses her innocence to and falls in love with Johnny Castle, the older dance instructor who leads a more rough-and-tumble life. As Frances notes in the opening narration:
  Frances: That was the summer of 1963 — when everybody called me Baby, and it didn't occur to me to mind. That was before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came, when I couldn't wait to join the Peace Corps, and I thought I'd never find a guy as great as my dad.
• The Graduate: Zigzagged in the Love Triangle that develops between Mrs Robinson, Benjamin, and her daughter Elaine. All three start in the summer after Benjamin has graduated from college, and it hits a major bump when Mrs Robinson reveals that she's going to pull Elaine out of college to keep her away from Benjamin. Ultimately, Benjamin rushes to Berkeley to be with Elaine, and it ends with the two of them fleeing her wedding. But the two still look at each other at the end, seeming uncertain that their summer romance has caused all of this.
• Grease: The movie opens with Sandy reminiscing about her romance over the summer and saying she'll never see her one-time boyfriend again. In the number "Summer Nights", in the school, both Danny Zuko and Sandy look back fondly on a summer romance they had with a certain person (each other), and tell their schoolmates all about it, unaware they are enrolled at the same school.
• The Heartbreak Kid (1972): Lenny falls in lust with Kelly while spending the summer in Miami Beach, on vacation with his new wife, Lila. The two have a brief, intense affair, though Lenny follows her to college and bothers her into giving him another chance. This shows the dark side of the summer romance, as Lenny does end up marrying Kelly that fall or winter, but almost immediately regrets it and realizes he made a huge mistake.
  Kelly: Certainly I remember Florida. I'll never forget it. But this is Minnesota, and I've got Political Science, and I've gotta go.
• Letters to Juliet: Discussed in Claire's backstory. British Claire Smith met Lorenzo Bartolini, a farmhand, while on summer holiday in Tuscany in 1957. While they made plans to run away together, knowing her upper-crust parents wouldn't approve, Claire felt conflicted and wrote a letter to Juliet Capulet in Verona asking for guidance. The letter was not found in time, and Claire decided to go back to London and settle down, though she never forgot Lorenzo. Sophie finding Claire's letter and answering it 53 years later kicks off the plot of the film, bringing the widowed Claire, with grandson Charlie in tow, back to Tuscany to find her summer love, which Sophie asks to write about. Lucky for Claire, Lorenzo has also since been widowed and never held her leaving against her, leading to them rekindling their romance.
• Mamma Mia!: The musical number "Our Last Summer" involves Sam, Bill, and Harry reminiscing about their memories of Donna during a long-ago happy summer with her in Paris, as Donna's daughter Sophie asks them questions. This is an Enforced Trope because the whole story of Mamma Mia is built around preexisting ABBA songs.
  I can still recall
  Our last summer
  I still see it all
  [...]
  Our last summer
  Memories that remain
• Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again: The Flashback B-Plot takes place during the summer after Donna's college graduation, showing the whirlwind romances with Sam, Bill, and Harry discussed in the first film that led to Sophie's conception and Donna settling on Kalokairi.
• My Summer of Love: Mona and Tamsin have an intense relationship entirely confined to one summer after Tamsin arrives from boarding school. It spans the gauntlet from the pair of them kissing to getting in hijinks. Mona's heart is broken when she learns that Tamsin appeared to have only ever seen her as a summer fling or "fun", as she lied compulsively about almost everything from her background, she's going back to school in fall, and her sister that she claimed to have died of anorexia is in fact still alive and well.
• Deconstructed in No Hard Feelings. Percy's parents want him to get an older... friend to take his virginity, so he can become more experienced and less afraid of life before he goes to college. They hire Maddie for this purpose, and Percy immediately has feelings for her. While Maddie is initially prepared to go through with it, they develop a (nonsexual) friendship over the summer that helps them both grow into adulthood.
• The Notebook: Noah and Allie have a summer romance in 1940, which results in them becoming each other's One True Love.
• Summertime: Jane is an Old Maid who falls in love with an antique dealer, Renato, while on a summer vacation in Venice.
• Summer with Monika: Monika and Harry have a whirlwind affair throughout much of the summer — which comes to a grinding halt when Monika gets pregnant and, at the end of the summer, they have to move back to Stockholm to support themselves, and the summertime haze wears off fast.
• Wet Hot American Summer, being set on the last day of summer camp, has a lot of these. Coop has spent the whole summer pining for Katie and spends the film trying to win her over; the sequel suggests that he's still pining for her 10 years later. Many of the other characters experience the Fourth-Date Marriage version of this; Ben and McKinley met at the beginning of camp and get married during the film, while camp director Beth and physicist Henry fall in love over the course of the film and end up together afterward.

Literature

• The Great Gatsby: Downplayed. Jay Gatsby and Daisy already dated five years before the events of the novel but they separated after the former went to serve in World War I. During the novel, in the middle of the summer of 1922, Gatsby and Daisy rekindled their romance in spite of the fact the latter's already married. However, it only lasted that entire summer as by the end of the novel, Daisy chose to stay with her husband instead.
• Hearts in Atlantis: Part of Bobby's summer of 1960 is spent falling for his friend Carol, eventually sharing their first kiss at the top of a Ferris wheel. Sadly it doesn't last, as Bobby and his mother move away before summer ends.
• In Discworld novel Lords and Ladies, nerdy Wizard Ponder Stibbons and the humbled, possibly failed Witch Lucy "Diamanda" Tockley are inferred to be having one of these in Lancre. Their superiors, Mustrum Ridcully and Esmerelda Weatherwax, may be five or six decades older, but both recall a time when a Witch and a Wizard had their own summer romance in Lancre.
• Shadow Song: Bobo had a summer romance with Amy Lourie in 1955. It doesn't last — until they meet thirty-five years later at their mutual friend Avrum's funeral.

Live-Action TV

• Black Books: Bernard invokes the temporary kind in "Fever," where he decides to find a girl explicitly just for the summer ("... and in the autumn, I'll ditch her, because she's my summer girl!"). It doesn't work, since the woman he thinks is his ideal "summer girl" soon finds him weird and creepy.
• The Brittas Empire: According to Helen in "Underwater Wedding", she first grew fond of Brittas throughout the Summer of 1983, having spent that time visiting him in hospital after he was hit over the head by a tyre lever. It was not long after that Summer that they got married.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Subverted. When Rosa and Adrian Pimento start having too much sexual tension in the office, Terry gets very uncomfortable. This leads to the following exchange with Hitchcock and Scully:
  Hitchcock: Loosen up, Sarge.
  Scully: Summer of love, baby.
  Terry: It's March, man. Shut up.
• Cobra Kai: Season 2 takes this to dramatic levels. Miguel and Sam break up after the All-Valley tournament, leaving the latter to fall for Robby after he moves in to the LaRusso household while the former hooks up with Tory when she joins Cobra Kai and becomes a top student. It lasts until close to the beginning of the school year where Sam drunkenly kisses Miguel at Moon's party, leaving Robby and Tory heartbroken, and setting the stage for the massive school fight.
• Dark (2017): Jonas and Martha talk about "what happened last summer" in Season 1. Episode 6 of Season 2 shows it: It was the Last Day of Normalcy before Jonas's father hung himself, when Martha and Jonas had Their First Time.
• Though the exact timeline is hazy, the penultimate episode of Poker Face's first season opens with drifter Charlie seemingly settling down with a hunky guy who wins her over with the beauty of the mountain scenery and vistas (and his rock-hard abs). They have a Falling-in-Love Montage showing the beauty and splendor of the area in summer before a hard cut to winter and Charlie desperately fleeing the harsh mountain snow.
• Discussed in House of Anubis. Following the Offscreen Breakup of Patricia and Eddie, as well as Fabian's failure to visit Nina in America, Nina not returning to the house in season 3 generated a lot of in-universe suspicion and gossip. Patricia and Fabian eventually became convinced that Nina staying home was because she and Eddie had a summer fling following the breakup, which would have meant she cheated on Fabian with him, and then stayed away out of guilt. This wasn't actually what happened, but the mere suggestion of it was enough to make Fabian fly off the handle.

Music

• Gracie Abram's song "I miss you, I'm sorry" is about a relationship that goes well in the summer, but goes downhill by the end of the year.
• Bowling for Soup's song "Graduation Trip" is about a relationship between two kids who met on a cruise on or just before their last school summer vacation. The romance eventually fizzled out due to the difficulties in maintaining a long-distance relationship, but the singer still looks back fondly on those days fifteen years later.
• "That Summer" by Garth Brooks is about a young man who goes to work for a widow as a farmhand, falls passionately in love with her, and loses his virginity to her. In the last verse, the now-grown man remembers his summer affair every time he passes a wheat field.
• Similar to the Garth Brooks example, "Strawberry Wine" by Deana Carter is told from the POV of a teenage girl who fell in love with (and lost her virginity to) one of her grandfather's farmhands when she spent the summer there. In the fall, her boyfriend had to go back to college, and though they tried a Long-Distance Relationship, it didn't work out. Many years later, she still comes back to the particular spot where she lost her virginity just to reminisce.
• Joyce Manor: "End of the Summer" is told from the perspective of someone whose romance is starting to fade away as the summer ends.
• Kid Rock's "All Summer Long" has him reminisce about a teenage romance he had in summer 1989, with a girl that he apparently hasn't seen since.
• Luke Bryan's "Roller Coaster" is about an intense summer romance that leaves the singer full of regret that it didn't last and wishing he'd told the girl his true feelings for her.
• In "See You Next Summer" by Brian Kelley, the narrator thinks his summer relationship could last long-term and tells his love interest that if she wants him to, he'll move to her hometown.
• Bob Seger's "Night Moves" is a double subversion in that he claims it wasn't really love that was going on during his teenage years between him and a girl during the Summer, and that they were simply looking for purpose. The end of the song seems to imply that, deep down, he truly did love her as he continuously remembers his time with her.
• Taylor Swift's song from folklore, "August", is about a person looking back on a utopian summer romance.
  But I can see us lost in the memory
  August slipped away into a moment in time
  'Cause it was never mine
  And I can see us twisted in bedsheets
  August sipped away like a bottle of wine
  'Cause you were never mine
• "'Til Summer Comes Around" by Keith Urban: the narrator had a summer romance five years ago and the girl promised she would come back, so he got a job in town and stayed to wait for her. The imagery of the town emptying and attractions closing for the winter emphasizes his loneliness at the end of yet another summer without her.
• The French song "C'est un beau roman, c'est une belle histoire" (It's a beautiful novel, it's a beautiful story) by Michel Fugain. He sings how a girl heading for the south for vacations crosses the road of a boy going the other way around, to go home in the north. They met on the road of vacations and decided to have a one night stand in a wheat field. Before parting ways the next morning, pursuing their respective paths and presumably never seeing the other one again, despite this being "a beautiful story".
• "Est-ce que tu viens pour les vacances ?" ("Are you coming for vacations?") by David and Jonathan. It's from the point of view of a local, remembering a girl in vacation in the place he live in, and he had a romance with last summer. He hopes for her to be back there for her next vacations, making clear he did not forget her.

Theatre

• Grease: In the number "Summer Nights", in the school, both Danny Zuko and Sandy Dumbrowski look back fondly on a summer romance they had with a certain person (each other), and tell their schoolmates all about it, unaware they are enrolled at the same school.
• In the Heights: Downplayed.
  • Usnavi has been crushing on Vanessa for a while, but they finally go out on Independence Day, with Vanessa realizing her feelings for him in the course of the musical.
  • Likewise, while Nina and Benny have known each other and lived in the same neighborhood for years, they don't get together until Independence Day the summer after Nina's freshman year at Stanford, when the musical takes place. Because Nina decides to go back to Stanford at the end of the summer, their relationship is left on an ambiguous note as to whether the romance will survive the separation, but Benny supports her pursuing her dreams. Discussed in "When the Sun Goes Down".
    Nina: I go back on Labor Day
    Benny: And I will try to make my way
    Both: Out west to California
    Benny: So we've got this summer
    Nina: And we've got each other
    Perhaps even longer

Video Games

• C14 Dating: Any romance started during the game is at the very least a long-term version, as such runs end with a Fast-Forward to Reunion in which Melissa's new romantic partner comes to visit her in the USA during the winter vacation that follows the summer during which the game is set.
• In the Crush Crush spinoff Hush Hush - Only Your Love Can Save Them, you only have a matter of weeks to save the five Destined girls on your summer vacation. How do you save them? By making them fall in love with you. After you've completed your job, you must return home. You can choose one character to come with you, even if they are not Destined. There are other love interests you can date just for fun.
• Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp is all about convincing one of your fellow campers, through various wacky hijinks, to date your character for their stay at camp.
• Our Life: Beginnings & Always revolves around your relationship with the deuteragonist Cove during four different summers over the course of fifteen years. Said relationship can turn romantic as early as when the two of you are thirteen to as late as when you're both 23. The DLC gives you two more potential love interests (Derek and Baxter) that you can also pursue a summer romance with.
• Deconstructed in The Quarry. Emma and Jacob had a summer fling while working as summer camp counselors, but when summer was over Emma decided to end things as she wasn't interested in a Long-Distance Relationship, while trying to be Amicable Exes. Jacob still has strong feelings for Emma and isn't willing to let her go, prompting him to sabotage the camp van so they can spend one more night together. This kicks off the main events of the game, potentially getting Emma, Jacob, and other people killed. Jacob's persistence also only pushes Emma further away, with her being especially upset if he confesses what he did.

Webcomics

• Parodied in the Paradox Space series "Summerteen Romance", which references the trope in its title. A "Romantic Dramedy" chock-full of Summer Campy cliches, it starts off full of Ship Teases (Feferi and Nepeta, Karkat and Dave...). Dave's narrative edits renders most of the romance offscreen, but by the climax Eridan and Hella Jeff did find love across enemy lines during a magical summer at camp.

Western Animation

• As Told by Ginger: In the TV movie "The Summer of Camp Caprice", Ginger develops a strong attraction with a handsome young counselor at the titular camp. In a following episode, Ginger, determined to see him again, goes to elaborate lengths to reach him, joining the school band who would be playing at his school. Upon reuniting with him, however, Ginger is heartbroken to discover that he has a girlfriend.
• Gravity Falls: Parodied and deconstructed with Mabel Pines, who is determined to spend her first summer away from home having an "epic summer romance". By "Society of the Blind Eye", she reflects that all of her attempts at romance have been duds, and is tempted to erase her memory of them when given the chance.
• Hey Arnold!: Arnold gets seduced by a girl a few years older than him in the Season 5 episode "Summer Love". However, it turns out that she was using him to win a big sandcastle contest, where the winner would have a guest appearance on Show Within a Show 'Babewatch'. Fortunately, Helga, motivated by jealously and protectiveness, learns of her duplicity and exposes it to Arnold.
• In The Owl House, during her time on the Boiling Isles when she was originally supposed to be at a detention center summer camp, Luz Noceda meets young witch Amity Blight, who initially started off as her enemy but soon became her friend and eventual girlfriend. Their relationship turns out to be of the permanent variety as they are still seen together during the Time Skip in the final episode.

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