the problem with being someone’s dream girl
what started as a review of the movie “Obsession” and ended with me psychoanalyzing my dating history
Spoiler warning: ⚠️ This essay contains spoilers for the movie Obsession. If you haven’t seen it yet, go watch it first and come back. If you have seen it, welcome. If you don’t care about spoilers, I’m terrified of you. ⚠️
This week I watched Obsession.
And before anyone says anything, yes, I know I’m late.
The movie came out last year. So the think pieces have been written. The tweets have been tweeted. The Letterboxd reviews have been Letterboxd-ed.
But it only came out in Lisbon this month. So now it’s my turn. Bear with me.
Ok so what I expected was a horror movie.
But what I got was a nearly two-hour cautionary tale about what happens when an average man develops a crush and starts treating it like a religious experience.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ll know I already have some thoughts about “good men.”
Obsession did not improve them.
But not because the movie is about a bad man.
That’s the thing. Bear isn’t particularly evil.
He’s not a criminal mastermind. He’s not a manipulative billionaire. He doesn’t have a secret family in another state. He doesn’t even have enough charisma to qualify as a red flag.
He’s just a guy.
A lonely guy.
And maybe that’s what unsettled me so much.
Because women are constantly warned about dangerous men.
We’re taught to look out for the obvious villains. The aggressive ones. The controlling ones. The men who punch walls and make your friends nervous.
Nobody really prepares you for the guy who just likes you a little too much.
The guy who remembers every detail you’ve ever mentioned.
The guy who looks at you like you’ve personally invented happiness.
The guy who has known you for six weeks but somehow speaks about you with the confidence of a man who helped raise you.
The guy who isn’t dangerous.
Until he is.
And I think that’s why Obsession got under my skin.
The movie understands something women learn embarrassingly early in life: being desired and being known are not the same thing.
In fact, sometimes they’re opposites.
Some of the men who want you most have absolutely no interest in who you actually are.
They’re in love with a version of you they’ve assembled from scraps.
A smile. A shared joke. An Instagram story.
Three conversations and a frightening amount of imagination.
By the time they tell you they love you, they’ve spent so much time with the fictional version of you that the real one barely matters.
And that’s exactly what makes Bear scary.
Not the supernatural stuff. Not the horror. The projection.
Because every woman watching this movie has met a Bear.
Maybe not one willing to make a wish at a magical tree.
But definitely one who decided she was his soulmate before learning her last name.
You know the type.
The man who mistakes compatibility for destiny.
The man who mistakes kindness for chemistry.
The man who mistakes his feelings for your responsibility.
Women know this archetype so well that we have entire group chats dedicated to identifying him.
Sometimes the warning signs are subtle.
Sometimes they’re not.
Sometimes it’s excessive eye contact.
Sometimes it’s “I’ve never met anyone like you.”
Sometimes it’s a playlist.
God help us all when it’s a playlist.
Nothing good has ever followed the sentence, “I made this and thought of you.”
Especially if we’ve only known each other for twelve business days.
There’s something uniquely unsettling about realizing someone has built an entire emotional infrastructure around your existence and forgot to ask whether you’d like to live there.
And what Obsession gets right, maybe better than any horror movie I’ve seen in a while, is that obsession rarely feels dangerous in the beginning.
It feels flattering. That’s the trap.
Nobody gets stalked by someone they immediately identify as a threat.
Nobody gets consumed by someone they instantly fear.
It starts with attention. Then admiration. Then investment.
Then one day you realize this person isn’t responding to who you are.
They’re responding to a character they’ve written and cast you in.
At which point you’re no longer a person.
You’re a solution. A fantasy. A cure.
And there is nothing more terrifying than being treated like the answer to a question you never asked.
The older I get, the less impressed I am by intensity.
I used to think the highest form of love was being chosen above everyone else.
Now I think the highest form of love is being seen accurately.
Not worshipped. Not obsessed over. Not turned into someone’s personal religion.
Just known.
Which is why Bear terrified me.
Because he’s familiar.
And if horror movies are supposed to reveal our deepest fears, then Obsession succeeded.
There’s one scene I haven’t stopped thinking about.
Not the jump scares. Not the violence. Not even Nikki smashing through the window.
The scene where Bear is sitting outside talking to Sarah.
The whole time, you know Nikki is coming.
You know something awful is about to happen.
And yet somehow it’s one of the warmest scenes in the entire movie.
For a brief moment, Bear is having the exact thing he claims to want.
Connection.
Sarah sees him. She talks to him. Challenges him. Treats him like a real person.
And what struck me most is that Sarah seems to know more about Nikki than Bear ever did.
She knows about her family. Her life. Her history.
Bear knows almost nothing.
In fact, one of the most frustrating things about Bear is how little curiosity he has about Nikki, the girl he claims to love soooo much.
He wants proximity to her.
He wants access to her.
He wants to be chosen by her.
But he rarely seems interested in the boring, unglamorous work of actually knowing her.
Which is a difficult thing to admit about a man who’s supposedly in love.
The movie keeps giving Bear opportunities to connect with actual people.
And every single time, he chooses the fantasy instead.
That’s what makes the final jump scare so effective.
It’s not interrupting a romance.
It’s interrupting the closest thing the movie has to genuine intimacy.
Because I don’t think my worst nightmare is a dangerous man.
I think it’s a perfectly ordinary one deciding I’m the meaning of his life.
Unfortunately, my thoughts on Obsession quickly turned into thoughts about my own dating history, which is how most things end around here.
Because the truth is, Bear didn’t scare me because he was unrealistic.
He scared me because I’ve met versions of him before.
And if you’ve ever wondered why I approach self-proclaimed “nice guys” with the caution of a Victorian woman encountering a wolf in the woods, this is probably a good place to start…
