“Love is probably the strongest emotion that you can feel.” Mendes tells me, “It’s very natural—and I wouldn’t want to say easy—but natural and comfortable to write about, and there’s so many different forms of it, millions of layers, you could write forever about it.”

An 18 year-old telling me this makes me sweat—I’m quite a stretch older than Mendes and I can’t seem to keep a relationship going for longer than a month—I dread the notion of writing about it forever. “The second you start trying to write about things that other people want to hear,” Mendes advises, “it’s not as honest as it should be”