“20 degrees Celsius,” my weather app beams. My eyebrows knit with confusion. Twenty degrees? I opt to forgo my jacket, and, if I’m feeling bold, no sweater either. It’s the first truly warm evening in Montreal, and as the city defrosts, everyone is spilling onto sidewalks and terrasses. Women are wearing tiny dresses, and men have started to write poetry. The whole city radiates optimism, as if Christmas has been moved to July, as if something wonderful is about to happen. I call this phenomenon “collective delusion,” the mental condition that arrives with summer, when everything becomes more theatrical and the city itself starts to feel like a stage. The air feels charged with equal parts excitement and suspicion. Summer is a season that people treat as a promise of becoming lighter, freer, prettier, more desired, more alive — and that promise is cruel because no season could possibly deliver on it.
Every year, I fall for it: the sun sells me a fantasy, and I’m its number one customer. Summer always seems to promise a better body, a new love affair, a different personality, more spontaneity, more invitations, and the illusion that life will become cinematic. The season is never just about the weather. It is my annual opportunity to imagine becoming someone else. June feels like a dare; I start thinking I am the kind of woman who drinks wine at 4:00 p.m., and suddenly my closet is filled with clothes designed for a version of my life that does not exist. I’m spending money with the same carelessness that belongs to girls with family money and naturally good skin. By the second week of June, I start moving through the city with the sort of confidence that can only come from heat and self-deception.
Summer is cruel because it publicizes the body. It strips away its protective layers, physically and socially, and every year I feel the same little panic begin to hum under my skin. As the weather warms, the questions arrive right on schedule: Is my summer body ready? Have I somehow failed the season before it has properly begun? This is where summer begins to feel punitive. Bare skin is sold to us as freedom by an entire culture obsessed with women looking beautiful in heat, when in reality it often feels like surveillance in better lighting. The higher the temperature climbs, the stronger the pressure to look effortless, bronzed, toned, and flirtatious. The more relentless the heat becomes, the more absurdly aware I am of everything: my legs, my stomach, the shine of sweat, the smudge of my makeup, the betrayals of hair in humidity. Summer afternoons gleam in a way that feels almost taunting. They make you more visible yet less secure at the same time. That is the tragedy of the season: it asks women to look relaxed at the precise moment they are most exposed. It is hard not to compare yourself in a city full of girls who look as if they were invented by July, girls who seem to have emerged fully formed from sunlight, while the rest of us are left trying to pass off self-consciousness as a kind of glow. As if enough bronzer, enough confidence, and enough pretending might turn discomfort into beauty.
In the same fashion, summer’s pleasures are never really free, no matter how naturally they try to present themselves. Patios, vacations, beach weekends, cottages, festivals — all of it is made to look casual by the sort of people who can afford for leisure to seem unplanned. But who gets to disappear for August? Who is serving drinks to the people participating in the summer? There is something especially bleak about being broke in a season organized around pleasure, having to work while everyone else performs freedom online. This is my real grievance with the fantasy of summer we are annually being sold: it pretends to be democratic because the sun shines on everyone equally, but the good version belongs mostly to people with money, time, and somewhere nicer to be.
Another cruelty of summer is men, desire, and the stupidity that arrives with the heat. Summer makes us behave as if desire is a simple matter. Who, after all, does not enjoy the idea of a little low-commitment seasonal flirtation? But the hotter the days get, the bolder and less interesting men seem to become. Summer gives them the confidence of people who mistake being outside for having a personality. Suddenly, every man with a drink on a terrace thinks he has become charming, when really he has just become visible. Still, there is something tempting about the performance. Summer romance is a genre people insist on reenacting, no matter how often it ends badly. As the days grow longer, so does the annual hope that this time I will have fun and not end up humiliated. I have come to believe that, collectively, we confuse heat with excitement, boredom with spontaneity, and loneliness with chemistry. Summer flatters desire by making it feel ambient and easy, when in reality, that atmosphere often hides how unstable and disappointing romantic attention can be. Summer is very kind to mediocre men. It gives them a little shimmer, and they almost always confuse it for substance. I say this without judgment, because I am hardly innocent myself. I know exactly what can happen when the night is warm, the light is flattering, and your standards begin dissolving as quietly as the ice in your drink.
Underneath all the brightness, summer can be profoundly lonely, perhaps because it is the season most aggressively associated with sociability, romance, and fun. And while I would never be gauche enough to admit to something as vulgar-sounding as the Fear of Missing Out, I do find it difficult not to feel that everyone else is out enjoying the leisure that is promised with the season. Summer creates a peculiar pressure not only to avoid empty weekends but to be seen having a good time. There is a quiet shame in staying in on a beautiful night and an even quieter fear of wasting the season altogether. There is shame, too, in not being transformed by it, in remaining stubbornly yourself while everyone else seems to have been improved by absorbing ample sunlight. Summer creates a special kind of sadness: not just unhappiness, but the humiliating sense that you are failing at pleasure. In winter, sadness at least feels seasonally appropriate. In summer, it feels impolite. Have you ever felt the strange violence of a beautiful day that does absolutely nothing for you, as if even the light has joined in to make you feel inadequate?
If summer disappoints so reliably, why does it remain so seductive? Because people need a season for projection. Summer offers a socially sanctioned period for hope, fantasy, erotic possibility, and the delicious idea that life could still become more beautiful. Its optimism is cruel, yes, but also strangely necessary. People want a time of year that seems to forgive ordinary life, to suspend its drearier facts for a few golden hours at a time. The point is not that the fantasy is false. The point is that we know it is false and still dress for it anyway. We buy the outfit, answer the text, stay out too late, and let the light persuade us one more time. I find myself on another hot evening in another summer dress, standing on another city sidewalk, with the air itself persuading me to smoke another cigarette. As I light it, I think: summer may be a lie, but it is the kind of lie that keeps people alive. Its cruelty is not that it fails to be pleasurable, but that it teaches people to mistake pleasure for transformation, visibility for freedom, and temporary brightness for a changed life. Summer is when everybody starts confusing good lighting with personal destiny. That, perhaps, is its real genius: not that it transforms us, but that it makes us briefly willing to believe we could be transformed. By August, I usually know better. By next June, I am once again willing to ruin my life for a sleeveless dress, a warm night, and a little golden light.