Like a breath of clear, cold, beautiful air on the coast, “Happy for You” by Dua Lipa offers simple, sincere lyrics and a soaring melodic line that point to something refreshingly real. Wise kindness in a pop song is rare, but that’s what we find here on the pop singer’s Radical Optimism album.
As Lipa sings, the heart releases into something a bit ecstatic, as it is invited into a mature form of love our culture rarely talks about: earnestly willing the good of the other, even if that has nothing directly to do with us:
I must have loved you more than I ever knew
‘Cause I’m happy for you
I’m not mad
I’m not hurt
You got everything you deserved
I must have loved you more than I ever knew
I’m happy for you
Dua Lipa has turned the corner into her 30s. She’s been through a few relationships. In her early twenties, she became famous for several anthems like “New Rules” and “IDGAF” which point to the dysfunction of the casual dating culture which has broken so many people down, understandably, into embittered shells of themselves.
But as life would have it—and rarely does among our cohort of female pop artists—Dua Lipa seems to have allowed life to grown her up, moving into a capacity for deeper, truer love (she is happily engaged to British actor, Callum Turner) and viewing the years prior through eyes that have become wise and kind.
She is able to view a previous love through a softening, merciful, and redemptive perspective, recognizing that sometimes things don’t work out between people, and that doesn’t have to mean there was a villain.
Sometimes it’s just not right. Sometimes you both mess up. Sometimes someone really does hurt you, but there is enough love and warmth in your heart to “cover a multitude of sins” and believe that people can grow and mature just like you’ve seen in yourself. In a real way, as it’s often said, to understand all is to forgive all. And forgiveness seems to be the underpinning power to her expansive message of real love.
The lyrics aren’t particularly elevated or literary or striving to be clever: they are, appropriately, the simple, straightforward words of someone who would be able to smile whimsically at a past love, upon running into them at a party or the grocery store, with a release and blessing.
Fundamentally, we learn that Dua Lipa is gracious, and are invited into the joy of mature release from what has bound our hearts in bitterness. Although each person can only walk that process out themselves—and some situations, maybe many, are brutal in such a way that the road to peace is much longer—a song like this in pop music is powerful in its implicit invitation to leave the offenses of the past in the past.
We see echoes of this same sentiment from another angle in “Maria,” where she thanks the previous love of her current love for helping him become what he is, as she likely has for others:
When love comes young, you take it for granted, yeah
Now he knows, certain things you can’t undo, no
Ooh, I owe it to you
Deepest effect always comes from a cause
I’m better too from the ones that I’ve lost
Now he is everything I’d ever want
I wanna thank you for all that you’ve done
Oh, Maria, I know you’re gone
But I feel ya when we’re alone
Even when I’m here in his arms
I know you’re somewhere in his heart
Maria
Maria
I know you’re somewhere in his heart
The lyrics are playful and perhaps to some, a little disturbing, but her point is boldly made: love is never wasted.
We become, permanently, pieces of ourselves only in and through the people we have known, and thus especially those we have attempted to love romantically, despite the ways things may have fallen apart.
This part of us never goes away. There is no escaping that.
Although ideally no one ever gets their heart broken and love can maybe just work the first time, it recognizes that in a messy world like we live in, we have a shared responsibility in trying to treat each other well and love well for the sake of those who will come along later if things can’t work out.
It comes from a place of trust as well that perhaps someone is also doing that on our behalf.
Again, we are seeing that Dua Lipa has a fundamentally mature perspective on love; namely, that you can will the good of the other, desiring in a real way that everyone be blessed and can win in the end, despite the heartaches and mess-ups along the way. We can shed our childish desires for revenge or “karma” and instead wish that the world be filled with redemptive love stories, strong relationships, and good families, to our shared corporate benefit.
There is an innocent, joyful, feminine heart present in these tracks that we’d benefit to see more of at scale, rather than so much of what is demoralizing and brutal.
In “Anything for Love,” she pines briefly for the times when love was worth truly fighting for.
But we already seem to know that, as almost a prize for her loving release of that which could otherwise perpetually harm her, she will find such a love.
And she gives hope that no matter how difficult love has been, there is always real possibility of it still being good if one can keep a free heart. Radical optimism, it turns out, isn’t foolish but the best possible strategy for a life of permanent love.