What Happened to Dustin's Girlriend Suzie in Stranger Things?
What happened to Suzie in Stranger Things is that the main series quietly leaves her off-screen in season 5, with no direct resolution in the finale, while context in the show and recent cast comments strongly suggest her long-distance romance with Dustin ended sometime between seasons 4 and 5.
Suzie is last seen in season 4, “Chapter Six: The Dive,” helping the California gang track down a special computer in Nevada that ultimately leads them to Eleven, all the while thinking she’s just doing something cute for Dustin’s birthday and still very much acting like a devoted, slightly dorky girlfriend, which makes her later absence feel even sharper for fans who loved that NeverEnding Story duet energy.
In the same stretch of story, viewers also learn that Suzie’s strict Mormon father discovers she’s secretly dating an agnostic boy from Indiana, reacts with full-on outrage, and even confiscates her computer, a pretty brutal move when the entire relationship depends on long-distance communication in the 1980s, so the seeds of an eventual breakup are already planted in-universe before the finale ever rolls around.
When the story jumps ahead for season 5, the focus is on Hawkins’ military lockdown, the emotional fallout from the battle with Vecna, and Dustin’s crushing grief over Eddie Munson’s death, and in that new status quo Suzie simply never turns up or gets named, even though Dustin does get a soft hint of a fresh crush when Stacey shows interest in him at graduation, which many viewers took as a quiet nod that he is single now and the Suzie chapter is closed.
One viewer pointed out that with “all the ‘Dustin’s grieving’ moments they might’ve broken up,” imagining him turning cold and distant the way Max did with Lucas after Billy’s death, and added that during a locked-down Hawkins, “everyone is being watched,” so something as innocent as using Cerebro to call Utah would suddenly look risky and unrealistic for both of them.
Another fan suggested Suzie was “a cute character” but that a long-distance relationship in the 80s, with no easy way to stay in touch and a girl who “wasn’t allowed to ‘date’,” was always hanging by a thread, so once Dustin started pushing people away after Eddie’s death, it made emotional sense that their relationship simply wouldn’t last no matter how many times they’d saved the world together over the radio.
A third voice on Reddit leaned harder into the family angle, reminding others that Suzie’s father had strictly forbidden her from speaking to Dustin again “because she’s a Mormon,” and arguing that when that kind of parental pressure is layered on top of Dustin’s PTSD and loneliness, there is “a good chance she wouldn’t have been able to talk to him again” even if she’d desperately wanted to keep the romance alive.
Someone else took a slightly more pragmatic tone and admitted Suzie “really wasn’t a big deal to miss,” saying they would have liked “a tiny bit of a Dustin romance storyline in S5” but also acknowledging that not every character needs a neatly wrapped happy ending, especially in a show that has always been as much about surviving trauma as about kissing at the Snow Ball.
Recently, Gaten Matarazzo, who plays Dustin, echoed a lot of these fan instincts in an interview, explaining that there was no official conversation with the Duffer Brothers about it but that what “can be assumed” is Dustin went through a “yearlong unhealthy grieving process” where he even cut off close friends, so “you can imagine he probably cut out a long-distance relationship,” and he admitted he doubts Dustin did it in a particularly kind or emotionally mature way because of where the character’s head was at that time.
Stranger Things Memes (@SThingsMeme) shared on X that Gaten Matarazzo revealed that Dustin and Suzie might have broken up off-screen.
Matarazzo also floated the opposite scenario and said it was just as easy to picture Suzie being “sick of his shit” and deciding, very fairly, that she didn’t have time to manage someone else’s pain from hundreds of miles away, essentially choosing to break up with him herself rather than stay stuck in a relationship that no longer felt fun, mutual, or safe for her emotionally.
Stranger News (@StrangerNews11) reported on X that Gaten Matarazzo suggested that Dustin and Suzie likely broke up before the final season, explaining that Dustin probably ended the long-distance relationship during his yearlong grieving process.
Put together, the finished Stranger Things episodes and this recent wave of commentary from both fans and Dustin’s actor point toward the same grounded answer to what happened to Suzie: she survives the events of the show but is phased out between seasons, with her romance with Dustin most likely breaking down off-screen under the weight of Hawkins’ lockdown, strict religious parents, and a boy who suddenly has more grief than he knows what to do with, leaving her as one of those bittersweet “what if” connections the finale deliberately lets hang in the background rather than tying into a perfect bow.
Disclaimer
This content is an informational entertainment recap based on the released episodes of Stranger Things and recent cast interviews, and is not an official statement from Netflix or the Duffer Brothers. Plot interpretations, relationship outcomes, and theories are subject to change with future spin‑offs or new material.
