Joe Goldberg and Love Quinn are just your typical suburban couple. They go to couple’s therapy, both of them get jealous and insecure sometimes, and they struggle to balance parenthood and their personal lives. Oh, and just a sidenote: they’re both also murderous psychopaths. What was alarming about Season 3 of the television show You was that while Joe and Love were quite the unique couple, a few of their dynamics still mirrored some of the very typical ups and downs of normal romantic relationships, if you take away all the bloodshed that is. Here are the real reasons why Joe Goldberg couldn’t handle meeting his match:
He got bored when his “ideal partner” couldn’t continue to live up to his fantasy of the chase.
Joe Goldberg may be different from many people, but apparently he’s just like many other emotionally unavailable people in the dating world: he lives for the chase and pursuit. And much like any psychopath, he’s prone to boredom and needs constant stimulation and novelty. That is why you see him creeping up on his neighbor as soon as Love Quinn and him settle down with their new baby. He’s bored because his image of Love as this unattainable pursuit has been shattered. His narcissistic traits led him to create an image of the woman of his dreams in every woman he fantasized about, where he placed these women on a pedestal – he created an ideal for every woman they could never live up to, and when he perceived a betrayal from them, he “discarded” them by murdering them. Love Quinn seemed to be that “ideal” innocent maiden type and that’s why he fell for her. However, once she showed him that she was far more brutal and just as murderous as he was, and served herself up on a silver platter, declaring to him they were soulmates, he was off to idealize another unsuspecting woman (or women, if we count his neighbor), just to regain the thrill of the chase again.
She showed him his true self and was too much like him for him to handle.
Love Quinn seemed like the “perfect” match for Joe Goldberg, morbidly enough. They both grew up murdering to protect the people they love, yet descended into more callous crimes. Instead of an innocent victim of his charms, she was also a psychopathic individual (albeit, more of an impulsive, secondary subtype of psychopathy) who was willing to murder in crimes of passion and retaliation (or in the case of her brother Forty, protection). Although Love is certainly less experienced than Joe in brutal, calculated murder and clean-up, her lack of empathy and impulsivity can be very dangerous, as is shown when she hurts Delilah and Theo. When Joe is confronted with someone who is, in many ways, his mirror image, he is repelled because it shows him who he truly is and the horrific nature of his own crimes. You of course is narrated by an unreliable narrator who justifies his crimes, so we will never know the true extent of Joe’s darkness (though the end of Season 4 did seem to highlight his ruthlessness), but seeing some of it in Love causes Joe to separate himself from the psychopathy of his wife and compartmentalize it as something different from who he is. In reality, they’re both two sides of the same coin. Maybe they are “soulmates” in that sense, but Joe seemed to subconsciously believe that murdering Love was killing off the worst parts of him, even though he did not think of himself as dangerous as her in all his hypocrisy. In truth, however, it was a decision to ultimately save himself. Never trust a psychopath not to betray you when the time comes, no matter how much love bombing you experienced.
Two psychopaths together will always be a struggle for power and control.
This show definitely hit the mark when it came to the behaviors of extreme psychopaths. Not only do they get a thrill from committing crimes together, there are scenes of them engaging in animalistic, primal sex from the euphoria of murder. Talk about psychopathic sadism. For a relationship between two psychopaths to truly last, one has to dominate the other completely. One has to be the “subordinate.” The TV show You doesn’t make it clear whether Love or Joe have the upper hand until the end, because Love is quite intelligent and intuitive, and can detect when Joe’s behavior changes. Thus, mind games and power struggles ensue, and two predators simply cannot make it work because one has to become prey. Joe Goldberg wanted to be the hunter, not the hunted. He perceived his wife as a threat to who he wanted to remain – a man who stalks women he sees as prey. Instead, he fell in love with a fellow predator, which he seemed to feel emasculated by (we’ll skip the joke of how it’s so typical for him to be threatened by a woman’s power and success). When it comes to the battle between psychopaths, only one can come out on top.
