“Once upon a time in Virginia, a girl loved you”

The expression “once upon a time in Virginia, a girl loved you” gives Lara Jean Song Covey a way to confess her love to John Ambrose McClaren while imagining that the confession will never reach him. Its fairy-tale opening makes a private memory sound already finished; the letter’s surrounding words complicate that finality, holding together a present-tense love and a goodbye shaped by John’s move away.

The Letter and Its Addressee

Lara Jean places the phrase near the end of a letter to John, after recalling the eighth-grade afternoon when they put away softball bats after gym and were caught in the rain. She remembers that she could not run as fast as he could, so he stopped to take her bag too. When the rain grew heavier, John whooped and grinned back at her, calling, “Come on, LJ!” Lara Jean locates the beginning of her love in that scene, down to the wet Keds she remembers wearing.

The phrase compresses the letter’s central contradiction. Lara Jean says she loves John, and thinks she may have loved him throughout high school; she also imagines that a future girlfriend might call him Johnny, a name she once hoped to use herself. She frames her own love as something he may never know, then says goodbye. The expression is thus not a report that her feelings have ended, but a way to place them inside an imagined past because she expects distance to separate them.

Memory, Distance, and the Past

Virginia gives the imagined story a specific place, while “once upon a time” lends it the shape of a tale told after its decisive events are over. That framing sits uneasily beside the immediacy of Lara Jean’s remembered details: the rain, John’s wet hair and shirt, the bag he carried, and his grin. The more precisely she recalls the moment, the less emotionally distant it seems; the sentence’s past tense tries to close what the memory keeps open.

John’s move away supplies the practical cause for this farewell. Lara Jean resents that his parents’ decision leaves the children without a say, yet recognizes that she is not his girlfriend and cannot claim a voice in the decision. The phrase gives her a final, private form of address: she can tell John that a girl loved him, even while assuming he will never hear it. Its simplicity makes the confession both intimate and deliberately indirect.

A Wider Pattern of Romantic Ritual

Elsewhere, Lara Jean’s longing for older forms of romance offers a useful contrast to the letter’s retrospective fairy-tale form. At Starbucks, while doing homework with Peter Kavinsky, she imagines teenagers dating with the ease she associates with the 1950s: a drive-in movie one night, a dance the next, and a pin that makes a relationship official. She calls the idea old-fashioned and postfeminist, but clarifies that she is not asking to date other people. What she wants is a lighter courtship and the possibility of remaining friends if a relationship ends.

That wish is rooted partly in the difficult aftermath Lara Jean sees in other relationships. She recalls that Margot wishes she had not let things become so serious with Josh, and that Peter disliked how serious things became with Genevieve. Her preference for a less binding romantic script is therefore not simply a taste for vintage gestures: it is also a hope that intimacy need not make later separation unbearable. The farewell phrase to John takes the opposite route, preserving feeling by placing it in a finished-sounding story.

Lara Jean’s attention to ritual also appears in the Valentine she makes for Peter. She assembles it from lace, ribbon, doilies, beads, pearls, rhinestones, and stamps, then stitches “YOU’RE MINE, PETER K” in pink string onto a white heart edged with lace. The card is teasing rather than grand, but it acknowledges that they are in a relationship. Beside that present-tense declaration, the letter’s imagined past tense marks a different kind of romantic expression: one addressed to a love Lara Jean believes she cannot openly claim.

Echoes of the Past

The phrase’s backward-looking mood also resonates with Lara Jean’s later sense that the past has abruptly returned. After a dance with John at the USO party, she sees Genevieve and Peter approaching with Genevieve’s arm linked in Peter’s. For a moment, it feels as though the past year has vanished and Lara Jean and Peter’s relationship never happened. The scene does not repeat the letter’s wording, but it shares its concern with how a present encounter can make an earlier version of life feel close again.

Across these moments, the expression serves as more than a romantic sign-off. It turns love into a remembered story before the feeling itself has disappeared, allowing Lara Jean to speak with tenderness while keeping the confession at a distance. The letter’s imagined ending is poignant precisely because its memories and declarations show that, for her, the past is not safely over.