Olivia Rodrigo’s new track ‘U+Me=<3’ is the fifth song on her album You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So in Love, and it does not bother hiding its feelings: yacht rock is good, silver jewellery is good, Cadbury beats Hershey’s, and the person who inspired all of it is, by her own lyrical account, pretty great too.
The song has been widely speculated to be about Louis Partridge, the Enola Holmes actor with whom Rodrigo is rumoured to have split in late 2025. The references in the lyrics are hard to miss. Rodrigo sings of her paramour’s ‘floppy hair’ and his ‘big sister’ (Partridge’s older sister is Issie Partridge) and her stated preference for British chocolate over American candy reads, given Partridge’s English roots, very much like a wink. As Rodrigo told Dazed in early June: ‘English chocolate is just so much better.’
The Alleged Split, and What Has (and Has Not) Been Confirmed
According to InStyle, various outlets reported a split in December 2025, a little over two years after the couple first got together. Page Six and The Sun both ran stories about an alleged breakup on 21 December. Neither Rodrigo nor Partridge has publicly confirmed the split in the months since. That lack of comment from either camp makes the autobiographical reading of ‘U+Me=<3’ all the more layered: the song reads like a love letter, not a breakup note.
It is worth noting that as recently as July 2025, the pair were photographed together at Wimbledon, attending day three of the Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in London, per InStyle. Whatever the current status of their relationship, the album captures a moment when things were very much alive.
Olivia Rodrigo on Her ‘First Adult Relationship’
Rodrigo has not been coy about what drove the record. She told Dazed that the album’s sound and lyrics grew directly from her first ‘adult’ relationship, describing it as a period of genuine self-discovery. ‘This album is about my first time being in an adult relationship; it’s me discovering what romantic love looks like in real time,’ she said. ‘I’ve been in relationships before that were really exciting and tumultuous in a teenage way, but this was my first time being in a real, “big girl” relationship.’
She went further, describing the experience as something that continues to feed her writing. ‘When you’re in an intimate relationship, it holds up a mirror and shows you parts of yourself that you would never normally see,’ Rodrigo said. ‘That was an endless source of inspiration, something that I’m still mining.’ It is the kind of candour that makes the specificity of ‘U+Me=<3’ land so hard: the yacht-rock confessions, the Cadbury request in the bridge, the line about wanting to get married at 25.
What the Song Actually Says
Melodically, ‘U+Me=<3’ is the smooth, West Coast-inflected track Rodrigo describes herself as a fan of: unhurried, warm, and disarmingly direct. The chorus (‘Carve our names into the car seat leather / You plus me equals a heart forever’) has the kind of hook that sounds effortless and is almost certainly not. The bridge is where the specificity really kicks in: ‘So buy me silver jewellery and all my favourite Cadbury / And tell me yet again about when we met and what you thought of me.’
There is also a pre-chorus that nods at the speculation she must have known was coming. ‘All my ex-boyfriends have heard these lines,’ she sings, before quickly undercutting any cynicism: ‘But I like you better by a million times.’ It is a neat piece of songwriting, acknowledging the pattern while insisting this one is different.
The outro is, appropriately, just two words: ‘Sounds good.’
You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So in Love is available now via Olivia Rodrigo‘s official channels. ‘U+Me=<3’ sits at track five on the standard tracklist.
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