Songfacts®:

• "Don't Take It Personally" is a song about jealousy, acceptance, and the general awkwardness of human relationships. Selena Gomez gently addresses a female friend of her romantic partner, Benny Blanco, who is struggling with the shifting dynamics (and may have, just possibly, been harboring some not-so-secret feelings).
• Gomez said "Don't Take It Personally" is based on a real experience where she was the one on the receiving end of such a conversation. "This song, we put together in a way where it was actually told to me," she explained in the album's official commentary. "This is odd to say, but yes, I'm the person that it happened to."
• Of course, given Selena's high profile on-and-off romance with Justin Bieber between 2010 and 2018, speculation ran wild the song is about Hailey Bieber (because, well, everything Selena does apparently has to be connected to the Biebs in some way). However, she has not confirmed this, and the lyrics are open-ended enough to let listeners apply their own experiences.
• On the production side, Benny Blanco teamed up with Californian hitmaker Blake Slatkin (The Kid Laroi's "Stay" and Sam Smith's "Unholy").
• This song is just one piece of a larger project, I Said I Love You First, a collaborative album between Gomez and Blanco that reflects their romantic evolution. The two, who began as friends, started dating in the summer of 2023 and got engaged at the end of the following year.