Of the songs on "Pet Sounds", "God Only Knows" is the most lyrically ambiguous. Commentators have sometimes attributed a suicidal quality to the protagonist. In the second verse, the narrator declares that "life would go on ... should you ever leave me", but if that outcome were to occur, then "what good would living do me?" The suggested implication is that they would end their life without their lover—an interpretation that Asher said was not intended by himself or Wilson. Among other interpretations, writer James Perone, who referred to the song as "one of the more unusual expressions of love in a 1960s' pop song", believed that there is "a hint that part of character's 'love' may be self-serving and part of a cycle of codependency."