Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we examine the celebrity couples who give us hope for our own romantic futures as we try to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
Like every other millennial woman I know, I wildly overidentified with Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album, Sour, when it first came out; indeed, I have now-fond, then-painful memories of driving around Austin in circles after a particularly tough breakup in a used Honda Fit I have since totaled, screaming along with the lyrics to “good 4 u” and wondering how a literal teenager had managed to so skillfully plumb the depths of my 28-year-old psyche. (Apparently, my woes are somewhat commonplace…who could have imagined?)
As it turns out, a lot can happen in four years; in the time that’s elapsed since Sour came out, Rodrigo has hit her early 20s, put out a sophomore album (2023’s lyrically complex, angry-yet-wildly-fun Guts), presumably stopped falling for gay guys (hey, she said it, not me!), and entered a relationship with Enola Holmes and Disclaimer actor Louis Partridge, with whom she was seen adorably prepping it up at Wimbledon this past July.
I have to admit: I find it kind of refreshing just how little I know about Rodrigo and Partridge’s relationship. I mean, for God’s sake, Rodrigo is 22 years old (prime time for oversharing about your dating life on social media), and I barely know a thing about the guy she’s been dating since late 2023, with the exception of what Partridge recently told Variety: “I’m very happy, and I think she is too, so all is good in our world.” Okay, how adorably British is that? We love a UK bloke who’s too elegant and gentlemanly to speculate about his own girlfriend’s happiness!
It’s not like Rodrigo and Partridge are never seen in public together—on the contrary, they’ve made certified joint-slay appearances at both the 2025 Grammys and the Vanity Fair Oscars party, as well as hard-launching on Instagram (it simply doesn’t get more real than that for Gen Z-ers, I’m told)—but in this world of constant social-media oversaturation, they’re incredibly good at keeping the details of their relationship private. Maybe this tracks: These two are just old enough to have seen how the famous aughts couples who preceded them were treated when they made their personal business public. Why risk becoming blog fodder for crone-adjacent stans like myself when you could just… vibe? I mean, I guess I’m blogging about them nonetheless, but you can trust that I’d be doing it a lot more if they were dramatically breaking up at the Chateau Marmont on Saturday night and getting back together over Erewhon juices on Sunday morning.