Growing up with no hard feelings

Jennifer Lawrence’s latest eyebrow-raising romcom brings the sexual-awakening story back from the 90s movie graveyard. Lauren Windle explores what it really means to grow up.

Lauren Windle

Lauren Windle is an author, journalist, presenter and public speaker.

A young couple sit next to each other on a beach sharing a towel.

Andrew Barth Feldman and Jennifer Lawrence.

Sony Pictures.

I hate to sound like your moany Uncle Raymond, but they just don’t make romcoms like they used to. The likes of 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless and She’s All That have never been replicated in recent times and attempts to recreate the 90s nostalgia have always fallen flat on their face.

It’s for this reason, I was excited when I saw No Hard Feelings hit the cinemas. The latest Jennifer Lawrence movie was pitched as a hilarious coming-of-age tale for the modern era. The story sees strapped-for-cash millennial Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) hired by the parents of an introverted gen-z lad Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), to help him into blossom into maturity – via the medium of sex. The meddling helicopter mum and dad were concerned their talented 19-year-old was more interested in computer games than socialising and fornication.

The film is silly. If you’re reading this to establish whether you should go and see it, I would say sure – if you want a low-emotional-investment flick that you’ll watch once but not twice. But the question it raised for me was: How do we know when we’ve grown up?

I felt I was most grown-up when tackling things alone. I wanted to be open to all experiences on the spectrum of sensible to reckless.

If the initial premise of the film is anything to go by, growing up means embracing partying, reckless behaviour, drinking and losing your virginity. This is, probably word for word, how 14-year-old me would have described maturity. In my adolescence, I believed that increased maturity meant more independence. I felt I was most grown-up when tackling things alone. I wanted to be open to all experiences on the spectrum of sensible to reckless. I formed opinions hastily and defended them resolutely. I was desperate to be trusted and to be “my own person”. My parents were a humiliating presence in my life who crowded my decisions with their own, old-fashioned logic. From my perspective; the less they were allowed influence, the better. To me, being an adult involved doing “adult things”, those that came with a legal minimum age requirement.

This is the kind of “maturing” that Percy is encouraged to do in the film. Maddie orders him a strong alcoholic drink, attempts to lure him into casual sex and persuades him to skinny dip. She instructs him to consider himself an adult and to distance himself from his parents (in fairness they did have a tracker on the 19-year-old’s phone and had hired a woman to take his virginity, so she probably wasn’t wrong in this instance). By all accounts, it seemed Maddie considered maturity to involve the same things as I did at age 14.

But I’ve come to realise that these milestones are often just touchpoints in a maturing process that is entirely circular. Stay with me on this one; ideally, we start life reliant on those who care for us, ensuring we eat well and get enough sleep, we spend time developing and learning, backing away from things that are likely to cause us pain. Then many of us ‘grow-up' and break free from those who raised us. We are no longer so careful about what we eat or how long we sleep, we begrudgingly continue learning or some shun education altogether. We are enticed by things which may or may not provide a short-term amusement but will definitely harm us in the long term. But the loop closes up.

We come to the realisation that true maturity is acknowledging that life is designed to be lived in community, reliant on those around us.

As we move away from the excitement and poorly judged choices we associated with maturity, we realise that we do, in fact, want to spend time with those who care and cared for us. We seek their wise counsel rather than avoiding it. We come to the realisation that true maturity is acknowledging that life is designed to be lived in community, reliant on those around us. And most crucially – asking for help isn’t childish but the most mature thing of all.

We start to want to care for our bodies. The idea of a hangover is repulsive and to be avoided at all costs, rather than a necessary penance for a fun night with friends. We want to invest in our growth and development in all the ways; emotional, mental, academic and spiritual. We start to self-impose the restrictions that we railed against in our youth. The idea of a 10pm bedtime is absolute bliss and events that start at 9pm are abhorrent.

By Maddie’s metrics, I grew up at 15, but by mine, I was 25. It wasn’t until then that I started asking myself questions about the person I wanted to be – not the one I thought others wanted of me. This is when I walked into a church and when I decided that really understanding what I believed was important. It’s also when I started letting thoughtful people speak into my life rather than being convinced that I knew better.

Despite being a decade on from that period of inviting in development and support, I still can’t be certain I’m done growing up, but I wonder if acknowledging that truth is its own form of maturity. From time to time, I get behind the wheel of a car from time to time and think: “Does anyone know I’m doing this unsupervised?” And when I babysit young children, I half expect a real grown up to come over and relieve me of the responsibility, telling me I’ve done a good job but they’ll take it from here. I asked a woman in her 70s when she finally knew she was an adult, she replied:

“I don’t know if anyone truly considers themselves grown up.”

The film perfectly illustrates our rush to mature, our societies’ obsession with collecting milestones and experiences and our warped idea of what adulthood should look like. But when I reflect on the maturing process, all I can conclude is that the more we grow in childlike awe, wonder and accepting of our limitations – the more mature we become.

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.