Contains broad spoilers for both series.
Romance has always borrowed the language of competition. A man pursues a woman. He wins her attention. He conquers her resistance. Eventually, after sufficient persistence, he “gets the girl.”
In lighter stories, these phrases can feel harmless. In Netflix’s YOU and the Disney+/Hulu series Tell Me Lies, however, that language becomes much more sinister. Both shows ask what happens when a man treats a woman not as an independent person, but as a problem to solve, a prize to secure or an audience whose approval will confirm his identity.
Joe Goldberg and Stephen DeMarco are very different men. Joe is a stalker and murderer whose idea of courtship includes surveillance, imprisonment and violence. Stephen operates in the more recognizable world of college parties, undefined relationships, jealousy and emotional manipulation. Yet both characters understand romance as a contest for control.
They do not merely want women to love them. They want to control the conditions under which those women make their choices.
Joe Goldberg and the Fantasy of Perfect Knowledge
Netflix describes Joe Goldberg as a dangerously charming obsessive who takes extreme measures to insert himself into the lives of women who fascinate him. That description captures the contradiction at the heart of YOU: Joe behaves like a predator while narrating himself as a romantic hero.
Joe’s internal monologue is central to the series’ portrayal of toxic love. Because the audience hears his thoughts, stalking is translated into the vocabulary of devotion. He searches a woman’s social media accounts, studies her friendships, discovers her insecurities and learns what she wants. He then constructs the version of himself most likely to appeal to her.
From the woman’s perspective, their meeting may appear accidental. Joe’s attentiveness may seem unusually perceptive. His arrival during a moment of difficulty may feel like fate.
The audience, however, knows that the coincidence has been manufactured.
This is how YOU dismantles one of the most enduring fantasies in romance: the idea of a man who understands a woman better than anyone else. Joe appears to understand women because he has stolen access to information they never knowingly gave him. What resembles intimacy is actually an information imbalance.
Joe knows where a woman lives, whom she speaks to, what frightens her and what she searches for online. Meanwhile, she knows only the identity he has prepared for her.
He does not fall in love with a woman as she exists. He writes a character and assigns her the leading role in his private love story. Beck becomes the talented writer who needs to be protected. Love becomes the soulmate who might finally understand him. Each new woman is transformed into evidence that Joe is sensitive, misunderstood and capable of redemption.
But the real woman inevitably disrupts the fantasy.
She has desires that do not revolve around him. She keeps secrets. She disappoints him. She may choose someone else. Once she stops performing the role Joe has imagined, his tenderness turns into resentment. His declaration that he would do anything for love gradually reveals its hidden meaning: he will do anything to prevent the woman from escaping his definition of love.
Joe’s relationship with Love Quinn makes this hypocrisy especially visible. When Joe encounters a woman capable of violence resembling his own, he does not experience the perfect recognition he claimed to desire. He recoils. He wants a woman whose goodness can absolve him, not one whose behaviour reflects him back to himself.
His fantasy depends on inequality. He may be dangerous, secretive and morally compromised, but the woman must remain pure enough to rescue his self-image.
Stephen DeMarco and the Violence of Uncertainty
Tell Me Lies removes the glass cage and replaces it with something more ordinary: a college campus, a dorm room, a party, a text message left unanswered.
The series follows Lucy Albright and Stephen DeMarco through an entanglement whose consequences stretch across eight years. Disney+ calls the relationship addictive, emphasizing how choices that initially seem small become permanently damaging.
Stephen’s power does not come from knowing everything about Lucy. It comes from deciding when Lucy will be allowed to know anything about him.
He offers attention and then withdraws it. He creates intimacy while avoiding clarity. He makes Lucy feel uniquely understood, then reminds her that she is replaceable. Other women, particularly Diana, become instruments of comparison. Lucy is encouraged to compete for a position Stephen refuses to define.
Where Joe manufactures coincidence, Stephen manufactures scarcity.
Affection becomes valuable because it is unpredictable. A moment of warmth appears to promise that the relationship is finally becoming real. The next withdrawal produces anxiety, self-questioning and an even stronger desire to regain what has been lost. The emotional pattern resembles a slot machine: the occasional reward keeps the player pulling the lever.
The jackpot is not love. It is temporary relief from the insecurity Stephen created.
Showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer has said that many women recognize a Stephen-like figure from their own lives, and that even a small amount of affection can become intensely addictive inside an emotionally abusive relationship. This is what makes Tell Me Lies more uncomfortable than a story about an obviously monstrous villain. Stephen’s behaviour can often be disguised as immaturity, confusion or ordinary romantic indecision.
A single unanswered message is not abuse. Neither is one jealous remark, one lie or one abrupt change of mood. But Tell Me Lies asks viewers to look at the accumulated pattern. Stephen repeatedly creates uncertainty, benefits from the emotional response it produces and then denies responsibility for that response.
His greatest weapon is plausibility.
He rarely needs to announce that he is controlling Lucy. He can simply insist that she misunderstood him. He can frame her anger as instability, her questions as neediness and her suspicion as proof that she is the real problem.
Joe tries to control a woman’s external world. Stephen gradually colonizes her internal one.
What Does It Mean to “Win” a Woman?
Both series reveal how troubling the phrase “winning her over” becomes when examined closely.
Joe and Stephen convert asymmetry into chemistry. Joe possesses information the woman does not know he has. Stephen possesses information he refuses to give. Joe controls the beginning of the relationship by staging encounters. Stephen controls its rhythm by alternating closeness and distance.
In both cases, the woman appears to choose the man. But her choice has been made inside a reality he has manipulated.
This is the great trick performed by the toxic romantic hero. He wants the appearance of freely given love without accepting the risk that genuine freedom entails. He wants her yes, but he cannot tolerate the possibility of her no.
Consequently, every response is absorbed into his preferred narrative. Resistance becomes proof that she is afraid of her feelings. Anger becomes passion. Jealousy proves that she cares. Her return proves that they are destined for one another. Even rejection can be interpreted as a temporary obstacle that greater persistence will overcome.
It is a closed system. The woman cannot contradict the story because every contradiction is rewritten as supporting evidence.
This is why persistence, so frequently celebrated in conventional romance, becomes dangerous in these series. Persistence is only romantic when it respects the other person’s freedom. Without that respect, persistence is simply refusal wearing a bouquet.
Why the Women Return
Neither series is most useful when treated as a warning about foolish women choosing obviously terrible men.
Beck, Lucy and the other women drawn into these relationships are not unintelligent. They respond to recognizable human desires: the desire to be noticed, to be understood, to feel exceptional, to recover from grief, to experience intensity or to believe that confusing behaviour contains a deeper meaning.
Manipulative people do not necessarily target stupidity. They target needs.
Joe presents himself as the person who sees beneath a woman’s public identity. Stephen makes Lucy feel that his attention is both precious and precarious. Each man creates the impression that being chosen by him will settle some unresolved question about the woman’s worth.
This is also why leaving does not automatically dissolve the relationship’s influence. A woman may intellectually recognize manipulation while remaining emotionally attached to the periods of tenderness that interrupted it. She may not simply miss the man. She may miss the version of herself she briefly felt she could become in his presence.
Tell Me Lies is particularly effective at depicting this residue. Stephen does not need to be physically present in every moment to remain psychologically central. Lucy anticipates his reactions, compares herself with other women and interprets new relationships through habits formed with him. His absence still organizes her attention.
That may be Stephen’s most disturbing form of victory: he becomes the standard against which experiences are measured, even when he is no longer in the room.
The Seduction Inside the Critique
Both shows face an artistic contradiction. They criticize toxic men by making those men compelling enough to hold an audience’s attention.
Joe is articulate, bookish and played with considerable charm by Penn Badgley. Stephen is attractive, socially observant and capable of intense chemistry with Lucy. The cinematography, performances, music and sexual tension can make both men magnetic even when their conduct is appalling.
Badgley has described YOU as an exploration of modern myths about love and masculinity, while also acknowledging the uncomfortable glamorization surrounding Joe. Oppenheimer has likewise discussed her intention not to glamorize abusive relationships in Tell Me Lies.
Yet intention does not eliminate risk. A critique can wear the costume of the thing it criticizes.
A viewer can understand that Joe is dangerous and still be drawn to the fantasy of his total attention. Someone can recognize Stephen’s manipulation while experiencing his emotional volatility as exciting. The same charisma that makes the criticism dramatically effective can also soften it.
But that discomfort may be part of the point.
Real control does not always announce itself with menace. It can arrive through intelligence, vulnerability, desirability and apparent sensitivity. The red flag is rarely presented as a red flag. More often, it arrives beautifully wrapped, carrying a flattering explanation for why ordinary boundaries should not apply.
The viewer’s attraction therefore becomes part of the experiment. YOU and Tell Me Lies do not merely ask whether we can identify a toxic man. They ask whether we can identify him while he is still being charming.
Two Different Cages
The major difference between the shows is the form their cages take.
YOU gives us the gothic, exaggerated version of possessive romance. Joe’s love requires surveillance, isolation and, eventually, physical captivity. His fantasy is total possession. When a woman can no longer fit his story, he attempts to remove her ability to tell another one.
Tell Me Lies offers the socially familiar version. Stephen’s control is built from mixed signals, withheld information, competition and shame. His fantasy is not necessarily to possess Lucy completely. It is to preserve access to her emotions. A woman who still reacts to him remains proof of his importance.
Joe wants to own the story.
Stephen wants to make sure the story never quite ends.
Together, the two series show that toxic relationships exist on a spectrum. The absence of Joe’s glass cage does not mean there is no confinement. Sometimes the cage is made from uncertainty. Sometimes its bars are hope, comparison and the belief that one more conversation will finally produce clarity.
Love Is Not a Contest
The darkest word in the familiar phrase “winning her over” may be winning.
Healthy love does not require one person to defeat the other’s resistance. It does not depend on hidden information, manufactured jealousy or emotional exhaustion. It allows both people to remain free enough that either could leave, because a freely chosen relationship is the only kind worth having.
Joe and Stephen are frightening not simply because they lie. They are frightening because they use the language and appearance of romance to make control resemble intimacy.
Their real victory is not getting a woman to say yes. It is getting her to mistrust her own no: to question what she saw, minimize what she felt and wonder whether pain is simply the price of being deeply desired.
YOU and Tell Me Lies ultimately expose “winning the woman” as a hollow masculine fantasy. A woman is not a locked room, a rival territory or a difficult plot awaiting the correct male protagonist. Love begins only when conquest ends.
When pursuit becomes possession, the love story is already over.
What remains is a power story wearing perfume.
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