Are You Bored Yet?
Song Meaning

Wallows’ “Are You Bored Yet?” is about wondering whether your partner shares the same relationship anxieties you feel 1. Cole Preston wrote it to capture “all these insecurities in a young relationship about the future” 1, including the fear that staying together now could later feel like wasted time if the couple eventually breaks up 1. Dylan Minnette has said the question “are you bored yet?” is really the narrator projecting uncertainty about his own feelings onto his partner 1, hoping they feel the same way so he is not alone and does not have to keep pretending 1.

The meaning

Cole Preston wrote the lyrics imagining a couple lying in bed getting ready to fall asleep, with one partner asking, “What’s wrong?” 1. That scene opens the song: one person keeps asking, the other has no answer and wants to “pretend to fall asleep now.” For Preston, the meaning is that “you have all these insecurities in a young relationship about the future” 1, including the feeling of “such strong love for this person, but it’s just poor timing” 1. He has described wishing, when he was young, that they had met later: “I wish we met when we were older... when we were 25 or I had my life more figured out” 1.

Dylan Minnette has said that is “sort of what the song is about in wondering if your partner, this other person, feels the same way” 1. The title question is really self-directed. “What this person is asking, in the song is what he’s not sure of, in himself” 1. From Minnette’s perspective, the narrator is “feeling lonely,” “feeling bored,” “feeling nervous of the future,” and feeling that “this is nearing its end” 1. The song also asks whether the partner is bored, “afraid that they’re missing out on things in their life,” and whether the narrator is “alone in this” 1. Preston has said he is “definitely... guilty” of that pattern in past relationships, where he would “project my own feelings onto somebody else” 1 instead of confronting them.

Those doubts are the kind of thoughts “you go through as an 18 to 20 year old in a relationship” 1. Minnette frames the long-term anxiety as: if they stay together for years, “are we going to regret it if we end up breaking up when we’re like 28 years old?” 1. A serious young relationship “has already taken up a big amount of time” 1, and the fear is that without other experiences they will later feel “this was all a waste of time” 1. The lyric “Too young to think about all that shit” was chosen to sound more natural and less cheesy than an earlier draft, locking in that young-relationship voice 1.

The song also depicts someone who knows what they want to say but will “lie” and shove those emotions “way deep down because they don’t want to cause problems and they’re just confused” 1. Preston describes stalling: “you stall saying things and you stall ending it” 1, caught between “caring about someone, while simultaneously wanting out of it” 1. In his writing, the “head start” refers to “another relationship... Someone else. Someone new” already waiting 1, which he calls a “very selfish” way to make it easier to let the current partner go 1.

The chorus holds that tension in place. Minnette wanted “we could stay at home or watch the sunset” to contrast the mundane with a romantic cliché 1, yet he “can’t get this question off my brain” 1. He hopes the partner feels the same “so it’s not just me, and I don’t have to keep pretending” 1, which is why the song asks, “Will you tell the truth so I don’t have to lie?” Braeden Lemasters reads the title more bluntly: it means “you’re already going to break up with this person, regardless” 1, “already so far gone,” so “why keep going for six months more?” 1.

Last updated 2026-09-02