The Cincinnati Bengals star quarterback Joe Burrow’s girlfriend, Olivia Ponton, has built her career in the spotlight, first as a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit and Victoria’s Secret model, then as one of TikTok’s breakout stars with millions of followers. That same spotlight now extends to a podcast of her own, where Ponton has started turning the same candor she brings to her personal life into conversations about books, therapy, relationships, and self-work.

Recently, on her podcast, Booked, Blonde & Busy, Ponton hosted Kier Gaines. A licensed therapist, author, and content creator known for breaking down mental health concepts in short across social media. Gaines recently released his first book, It All Starts When You Do: How to Do the Real Work of Self-Healing, and joined Ponton to talk through some of its core ideas, including how people move through shame, grief, and uncertainty, and how healing is less about arriving at a finish line than learning to carry what’s already happened.

On her podcast, Olivia steered the conversation towards something specific. The fictional men women fall for in popular romance and fantasy novels, and what that attraction says about real relationships. Using the well-known “book boyfriends,” Ponton walked through why certain traits, like secrecy dressed up as protectiveness, tend to read as romantic on paper.

“So, in these fantasy books or fiction in general, obviously in most romance books, it is a man and a female getting together. These men, girls get really, really attached to, and they become like your book boyfriend that you’re obsessed with…Now, why do you think females, specifically young females, might be obsessed with them.

“So, we have Xaden from Fourth Wing. He’s like brooding, super private. He lies to you constantly. Xaden, but he calls it like protecting,” Ponton asked Kier Gaines. “Oh, I didn’t tell you because I’m just protecting you. Like, why does I’m protecting you read as love? Like, oh, he loves me because he’s protecting me, but it’s just lying.”

Now Gaines, in his response, drew a clear line at autonomy. The moment someone’s “protecting” you actually removes your ability to choose, whether to leave, to know the full picture, or to make an informed decision about your own life, it becomes something closer to control.

“Protection is weird. Protection is this, like, weird part of masculine identity that feels very supposed to instill a feeling of safety. But you can manipulate what you think protection is supposed to mean.”

That distinction maps almost perfectly onto Xaden’s arc in Fourth Wing. His justification (keeping Violet in the dark to prevent her from being killed) sounds noble on its face.

Gaines doesn’t argue that his intentions are bad. He argues that intention isn’t the point. Whether the secrecy is well-meant or not, Violet still isn’t the one deciding what she gets to know about her own circumstances, and that’s the part fiction tends to gloss over in favor of the swoon.

According to Kier, being spared someone’s worst behavior doesn’t mean you’re special, it just means the timing hasn’t caught up with you yet. And mistaking that gap for genuine regard is an easy trap to fall into, whether it’s a friend, a partner, or a brooding book character who claims he doesn’t love anyone else the way he loves you.

Gaines followed that thought with a direct piece of advice,

“Don’t fall for the exceptionality thing. A person is who they are. Just because you’re exempt for the time being doesn’t mean you’ll be exempt forever.”

No matter what the book boyfriends do, and even if they realize where they were wrong once the story ends, it shouldn’t change the reality. Real love doesn’t need to disguise itself as control, and being someone’s exception will never be the same as being their equal.