Get In, B*tches: It’s GTFO Summer

If you’ve been ~reading the room~ these days, you may have noticed that people aren’t exactly thrilled right now. Whether it’s my Instagram filled with memes about moving to Mars (it’s uninhabitable, guys!), or my city-dwelling friends declaring they need to live on a farm forever (you hate dirt, Katie), or literally anything happening in the news (I prefer a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but it’s not working out), everyone’s feeling just a little bit… off.

The solution? To GTFO this summer. I don’t just mean from the heat of the city — I mean from our brains, our phones, even our countries. The vibes are not great, and the most obvious solution seems to be up and leaving.

Which is exactly what the protagonists in this summer’s steamiest romance novels are doing. Some are running away — like Lola, the lead of Tinx’s fiction debut, Hotter in the Hamptons. To escape her bad press and dwindling fan base after a very public snafu, the fashionista travels to the homeland of spurned socialites: the Hamptons. And she’s not the only one. In many of the summer’s hottest rom-coms, characters are fleeing their current circumstances — whether it’s a rom-com writer trying to outrun her soured reputation in Any Trope But You, a musician evading her writer’s block in Sounds Like Love, or a novelist hiding from her woes in Story of My Life.

GTFO Summer is about more than just escaping, though. Some novels’ protagonists are decidedly running toward something — GTFO-ing in search of new opportunities. In Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life, for example, Alice and Hayden GTFO to compete for the chance to write a famous heiress’s biography. Although readers later learn that, of course, there’s plenty going on at home that the two were happy to leave behind, their impetus to GTFO is to build a bigger, better life. See also: a baker’s dream of starting a sugar-free bakery in Salty, Spiced, and a Little Bit Nice, a lawyer seeking workplace inspiration in How Freaking Romantic, a researcher itching to test her detective chops in Last Ferry Out, or a photographer searching for clarity about what to do with her life in One Golden Summer. Maybe it’s the over-caffeinated cold brew, or maybe it’s the AC blasting, but something about summer feels so refreshing and energizing that it inspires us to look around and see what else is out there.

Maybe it’s the over-caffeinated cold brew, or maybe it’s the AC blasting, but something about summer feels so refreshing and energizing.

Regardless of their motives, however, the recurring theme is that the characters have agency: They choose to leave — and ultimately, they choose whether or not to come home. Often, what they find is better than what they left behind, whether it’s falling in love with someone new, falling back in love with someone they’ve known forever, finding the perfect job opportunity, or finding a new home. Otherwise, GTFO-ing gives them the perspective they need to return to the lives they already built: They learn that their problems are fixable, and they’re ready to give it another go.

That, at its core, is what GTFO Summer is all about: perspective. Taking a step back from your everyday to see if you simply need a vacation, or if a whole life makeover is in order. You can remember that even the most sh*t situations don’t last forever, that there are other options. Summer is the perfect time for this, too. When do you have more energy than when you’re drinking a lemonade on a hot day, trying to distract yourself from a sunburn? If winters are for hunkering down, summers are for getting second winds and fresh starts.

We don’t all have unlimited bank accounts or PTO, but most of us can hop on a train and get out of town for the day. We can shut our phones off and wander. We can wear sunglasses so big no one would recognize us. We can GTFO, if only for a little bit — and maybe this summer, that’s the move.