Does Summer Make You Feel Like You Could Fall in Love?

Ten o’clock and still warm. The city doing what cities do in best in summer.  Be alive, unhurried, spilling out of doors and into the evening.  This is what I wait for all year. Not just the warmth, though the warmth is everything. This feeling of being open. Of being, somehow, available to life in a way that February simply does not permit.

Which led me to a question I’ve been turning over ever since. Does summer actually make us feel like we could fall in love? And I don’t mean romantically, though of course, yes, that too.  I mean in the broader, more generous sense. With our own lives, seen suddenly in a different light, literally and otherwise.

I think it does. I think summer opens something in us that the rest of the year quietly closes.

It is the accumulation of small things. Finding, without quite deciding to, that you sit for longer as the heat settles into the day.  That there is nowhere better to be than exactly where you are. Dressing lighter, and feeling lighter for it, freer, somehow more yourself in fewer clothes and less structure. Waking to the first hints of sunlight through the curtains and feeling, before you’ve even opened your eyes properly, the particular optimism of a day that promises real heat. Even the days spent indoors feel cooler, calmer, unhurried by comparison.

Almost without effort, we eat lighter, fresher, more often than not, salads and if Im honest, I’ll take a dry July over January with alcohol playing havoc with the body’s own thermostat in the heat.

This year, summer arrived with force. Temperatures soared through June and have, as far as I can tell, shown no real sign of relenting. Which suits me fine. I love what summer does to me: it slows me down, opens something up, and reminds me, every single year, what the whole thing is actually for.

The body knows first

There is, it turns out, a physiology to this feeling, which is reassuring, because it means you’re not imagining it. Longer days mean more light, and more light means more serotonin, the neurotransmitter most associated with mood, warmth, and the sense that things are, broadly, going to be alright. Vitamin D, which so many of us are chronically short of through the British winter, begins to restore itself. The nervous system, which has been quietly bracing against the cold and the dark for months, starts to let go.

The body, in other words, relaxes. And a relaxed body is a body that can feel things properly. Pleasure. Curiosity. Attraction. Joy. We are not imagining the lift.  It is real, it is biological, and it is one of the most underappreciated gifts of the season. Our nutritionist Gigi Erhardt, who joins The Gilded Queen this month, has shared her insight about how what we eat in summer supports this with lighter foods, better hydration, the way the body genuinely thrives when we stop asking it to generate its own heat and simply let it be warm. But the light alone does something remarkable to the spirit.

We are, at our core, creatures of the sun. We always have been. And when it finally arrives, something ancient and unhesitating in us turns toward it

When everything becomes easier

Consider what summer actually does to the texture of daily life. The diary lightens. The expectations at work soften as though even professional life has agreed to put on linen and stop trying quite so hard. The social calendar shifts from obligation to desire. You don’t attend summer gatherings out of duty; you go because you want to, because the evening is warm and the company is good and there is a garden involved and why on earth would you stay home. And this is when possibilities open our hearts.

And suddenly there is so much to say yes to.  A festival, a concert in the park, an open-air theatre under a sky that hasn’t yet decided to go dark. Long, shaded walks through woods and fields that in January would have felt like an ordeal and now feel like the whole point of the day. London, in particular, comes properly alive at night with people spilling out of bars and cafes and pubs onto the pavement, as if everyone has quietly agreed to make the most of every last moment, to feel just a little freer.

In summer, people say yes. They show up. They stay late.

The table outside

And in this easier, lighter, more available version of life, we become a more available version of ourselves. Less defended. Less hurried. Less preoccupied with what’s next on the list. We have time to actually look at the person sitting across the table. To listen without half our attention already somewhere else. To notice things — the way someone laughs, the way an evening smells, the way a conversation can surprise you by going somewhere you didn’t expect.

And then, just as easily, the impulse to do nothing at all. A blanket in a park. A sky that seems somehow bigger than it was in winter, and if you’re lucky enough to get properly under it, actual stars. A pause. That rare, unhurried sense of being entirely, wordlessly at one with wherever you happen to be.

This is not nothing. This is, in fact, almost everything. Because so much of what prevents connection is simply not being present enough to allow it.

There’s something about a balmy night that stirs adventure.  Beyond the pleasure of the food or the setting, outside the boundaries dissolve a little.  This is what I love most about al fresco dining, the open sky overhead makes everything feel both more significant and free. Do we linger longer outside, letting conversations go where it wants to go? Laughing a little easier, telling of truest things and possibly at best , off guard.

And off guard, is precisely where people fall in love. Not just romantically, though summer statistically and in the memory of nearly every woman I know carry a love story from summer, but off guard with a friend that makes you see them entirely different. In summer the serendipity of a chance introduction where one might have stayed at home, drawn out by the headiness of a summers evening. A concert, a wedding reception, a dinner party that stretches late into the evening. Off guard with your own life and seemingly more beautiful than you may have thought in January.

Do we open our hearts in summer?

I believe we do. I think summer removes, temporarily and mercifully, several of the things we use to keep ourselves at a safe distance from feeling too much. The busyness. The cold. The sense that we must be efficient and purposeful and productive at all times. Summer lifts all of that, and what remains is something softer and more receptive.

Ladies, I think, feel this particularly keenly. We have spent years,  decades, in many cases being indispensable to other people. Running things, holding things together, being reliable and present and capable. Summer offers a brief, gorgeous respite from all of that. The children are elsewhere. The office is quieter. The social performance of the rest of the year takes a breath. And in that space, we remember something we may have half-forgotten: that we are people who feel things. Who want things. Who still are, always entirely capable of being surprised by life.

Yes. I think summer absolutely makes you feel like you could fall in love. With yourself. With your friends, who are funnier and more wonderful in the warmth. With the English coast on a clear morning, which is one of the most quietly spectacular things this country offers. With the long days and the easy evenings and the swallows overhead and the glass of something cold and the conversation that goes on and on because nobody quite wants to be the first to suggest going home.

With your life, exactly as it is, seen in its best light.

That, it turns out, is enough.