by Olivia Dean · 2024
The song Let Alone The One You Love by Olivia Dean is about realizing that someone you love is holding you back and not treating you with the care and respect you deserve, leading to the painful decision to end the relationship for your own well-being.
This song has been Shazamed over 48,256 times. As of this writing, Let Alone The One You Love is ranked 186
‘Let Alone The One You Love’ by Olivia Dean is a song about heartbreak, feeling let down, and realizing someone you love isn’t treating you right. We’re going to look at the feelings, story, and lessons hidden in the lyrics. ⬇️
️ From the very first lines, Olivia Dean sets a bittersweet mood—there’s a sense of hope turning to disappointment, comfort turning to coldness. The song’s world is colored by longing, vulnerability, and the sting of betrayal.
The chorus is where the heartache spills over: “It’s too much to mend / You’re the hug that had to end.” Here, we feel the pain of clinging to something that’s already slipping away, the desperate wish that love wouldn’t shrink us or make us small. We can’t help but ask ourselves—who would ever treat a friend, let alone someone they love, with so little care?
In the verses, Dean unpacks the unraveling of trust—“Thought I was safe / You were the warmth that I needed,” she confesses, only to reveal how quickly things shifted. There’s a real ache in her admission that she’d encourage her partner’s dreams without hesitation, but when it comes to her own needs, suddenly she’s “too much to handle.” The lyric, “Well well I’m not having it, babe,” is quietly defiant—a refusal to stay diminished, even if it means walking away.
What Olivia Dean really lays bare in this song is the sharp contradiction between what we give in love and what we sometimes receive—reminding us, with poetic candor, that true affection should never require shrinking ourselves to fit someone else’s comfort zone.
Writer(s) of Let Alone The One You Love:
