Joe's Relationship with Love Quinn in Netflix's You

 Joe’s ‘perfect match’

When we first meet the ‘real’ Love Quinn we are invited to believe she is the female Joe Goldberg; she’s a killer too. It’s safe to say Joe and Love are very hurt people after experiencing traumatic childhoods that led each of them to violent tendencies and deeply troubled psyches. Love ‘matches Joe’s freak’ if you will (I’ve seen a lot of these comments on You edits and, well, they’re not exactly wrong). Joe’s actor, Penn Badgely, concedes in an interview with Rotten Tomatoes that ‘if it was ever going to work for Joe it was her [Love Quinn]’. So where did the perfect murder-couple fall apart?

All images from You, Netflix

Their fundamental differences

Love and Joe seem so similar to us, not only because they are both murderers but because they both say they kill to protect those they love. This is what makes Love fall in love with Joe - she believes he is a protector like her and for once someone in her life might love her back with equal care. However, Love’s existence in the story exposes Joe. Love shatters the illusion he has built by lying to the audience in his voiceover for two whole seasons. Love truly embodies the killer who protects with a violent passion and a disturbed but selfless care for others, the person Joe swears to us he is. Next to her, he is the fraud. 

Love’s violence began as a child when she murdered a nanny who was grooming her twin brother. Joe’s violence began as a child when he killed his mother’s abusive partner. I don’t think these acts of protection had the same effect on them going forward. Love becomes reactive in her violence: a quick, sudden, unforgiving, and ruthless defence against anyone who poses a threat to her twin, her son, or her husband. Whereas I believe Joe becomes resentful of the victim, his mother, especially because she had to put him into care when she couldn’t cope. His violence has never truly been about protection but, like his dictating voiceover, about control. Joe most crucially wants to control how he is seen. He wants people, especially women, to see him as a white knight; the ‘good guy’ of the story. Ultimately, Joe doesn’t actually kill to protect but to selfishly appear selfless.

When Joe sees the real and murderous Love Quinn, it frightens him. A popular explanation as to why, is because Love is his ‘mirror’ - she reflects Joe’s true self back at him and he hates the monster he sees - however this opinion only feels half correct to me because as I’ve said, Joe and Love don’t murder for the same reasons. I instead believe Joe is frightened of Love Quinn in two key ways. 

Firstly, Joe does feel something real for her. They see each other. This is the only time he ever has true feelings for anybody beyond a stalker’s obsession and it scares him (he says to Love’s ghost in Season 4 ‘I really did love you once’). But, in their relationship Love wants their respective pain and violence to be recognised for what it is, the ugly truth of it all. She wants honest connection, something you don’t get without seeing each other’s flaws and Joe just wants to lie to himself or at the very least to us, that he’s not a monster. This ties into the second reason Joe’s frightened of Love: he can’t control her. He no longer sees her as the perfect victim to swoop in and ‘white knight’ like the other women he pursues. He can’t control how Love sees the real him and accepts it – how she doesn’t buy into his carefully calculated ‘good guy’ narrative. The narcissist inside of Joe needs to conquer. 

The gender politics of it all

Another way we can read Love and Joe’s differences is through gender as there’s certainly an intended commentary written into their relationship, as emphasised by the show’s ending in Season 5 and what becomes painfully crystal clear about Joe; Joe is a misogynist. 

Joe pursues ‘broken’ women to make himself seem a saviour and ‘not like other men’. His definition of ‘fixing’ though, is actually about controlling these women and manipulating them to be entirely reliant on him. He kills anyone in his way to achieve this. His obsession with ‘helpless’ women stems from his mother’s victimhood. Then when these women stand up to his crimes and fight his control, he gets nasty and his violence turns to them, this is where his hatred of his mother resides as he calls them ungrateful. He admits all of this in the ending of Season 5. This is why Joe’s violence is drenched in narcissistic control, hate, and sadism, particularly towards women. 

Love’s unhinged violence comes from a more feminine place. She subconsciously takes the role of caregiver to her unruly and unkind family because she is the only daughter. Her brother gets to take little to no responsibility and remain immature despite them being the same age. She has a fierce maternal protection about her which is elevated when she becomes a real mother and finally has her own family to protect, a family separate from the one that she spends her life fighting for despite being constantly punished by. Murdering to protect her loved ones becomes an impulse, a reactive outlet for the pain and bottled-up anger she is constantly and tiringly managing.

The moment Love is revealed to be a murderer like Joe, she breaks the victim mould he obsesses over so he goes to kill her immediately. If we’re going to do the gendered reading properly, that’s a double standard right there and one Love calls out directly: 'You act all pure and noble, like you have reasons for what you do, but when I do it, I'm crazy, I'm some manic nutjob'. Only the fact she is pregnant saves Love from her throat being slit (the idea that women’s lives are only worth something as vessels of reproduction is definitely demonstrated by Joe here too). 

Yet, in that unplanned forced proximity timespan as parents, Joe unwillingly experiences the closest thing to real love he is capable of. He admires how loving of a mother Love is to Henry and the depth of emotion she has. Joe actually begins to see Love for the individual she is. I think this is the only time he ever views a woman as a real person. So of course, given his more than toxic attitudes towards women, he’s placed in a troubling paradox of hate and love for his wife. 

When Joe’s pathological obsession with stalking inevitably finds another woman, he asks Love for a divorce first because he no longer wants to kill her (that's big for him!). However, for this murder couple, the tragic beauty of knowing each other so well means that both expect the other to try and kill in this difficult and pivotal conversation. Love moves quickly to protect her son and crucially for the first time ever, herself. She poisons Joe’s food, pre-empting him grabbing a knife. Joe over-powers Love and instead of disarming her, goes out of his way to kill her because he has to win, he has to control, and he has to dominate. It’s the only thing that will give him satisfaction even though his ‘love’ for her will haunt him forever – and it does. In the subsequent seasons he never escapes the fact that he murdered his perfect match because he just couldn’t help himself. Love’s dying words to him are ‘our will know what you are’. 

How Joe’s relationship with Love fits into the thesis of You

Season 5 drilled home to those who wouldn’t admit it that Joe is a misogynistic stalker and serial killer. He tormented and murdered many, many women, and largely got away with it because of his skills in manipulation, skills he used on the audience too in controlling the narrative for most of the show (this is done to shine a light on how easy it is for victims to fall into predatory men’s carefully laid traps). Joe felt real things for Love, a woman almost his equal yet even she couldn’t escape him and that demonstrates just how irredeemably dangerous he is.

By choosing himself over the only woman he ever shared genuine feelings for, Joe significantly debunks his lying voiceover – he doesn’t murder to protect true love like he says he does, but for control. Really, the couple’s differences lay in a question of narcissism: they were both murderers, both unwell, but Joe was a narcissist and Love was not. The fatal difference however was that Joe was a man, and Love, was not.