You and the Absurdity of Searching for Love
The moral case for why searching for love can go horribly wrong through the Netflix series 'You'.
Everybody wants to be loved.
Very few people would disagree with that idea. People need to feel connected to others. They want to feel like someone cares for them in some way. Often times they want it to be the kind of caring which might even make their absence painful to feel. You could even call it a kind of love. Although the idea of love and that need aren't necessarily directly connected. It's possible to have one and not the other. If you're lucky, you manage to find someone who feels both, and hopefully you feel the same way about them.
Wanting both however can go horribly wrong if you're not careful. Human beings are complicated creatures. They have all kinds of sides which they don't always show you right away. Some of those sides are parts you might not like when you eventually see them. Which makes finding someone to be with a very difficult thing. Even if you find that person, there's no guarantee that they will find it in you. There are entire genres dedicated to the discovery and consummation of these types of love. Hallmark movies in particular are famous for having this play out on screen.
What makes the show 'You' so fascinating is the way in which it turns this search on its head. The ideas behind the traditional love story still apply, but they're twisted and turned until they're not quite the hopeful messages they understand it to be. Things like a meet cute, the first date and the way people develop feelings for each other are given an entirely different light.
Perhaps the clearest picture of this is in Joe Goldberg. He takes on the role of the traditional main character in a romantic comedy. The down on his luck guy who just wants to be loved. But instead of being the nice guy who meets someone and falls in love, he becomes fixated on a person and looks for ways to create the circumstances of a traditional romantic comedy around him. Of course the problem with traditional romantic comedies is that they aren't real life. People don't actually have the kind of experience that happens on screen.
Relationships are complicated in a lot of ways like people are. They don't fit into neat little categories and don't respond to things the way it happens in a rom-com. 'You' makes an honest attempt to grapple with that complexity and understand how it can go wrong. But it takes things to a disturbing and ultimately destructive end point. In doing so however, it reveals how absurd the search for love and the longing which often comes along with it can be.
Constructing the idea of the perfect person for you in your head is very easy. Finding a person who lives up to all those ideas and aspects is an incredibly difficult thing. How much you're willing to live with the difference between the ideal, mostly fictional version of a person and the reality of who they are is the problem we have to grapple with. If you hold too tightly to that ideal, you become the kind of person who might be willing to force it on the person you want to be that perfect person.
And that always ends badly, both for you and the people you force it on.
Take the time to explore that conflict within yourself by checking out You on Netflix no matter where you are.
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While I agree with you that many people use tv and movies as templates for how a relationship “should” go whether consciously or subconsciously, Joe’s character is so deeply scarred by his childhood abandonment issues that he has no other template from which to draw.