All the girls Joe Goldberg was obsessed with in You

You, a psychological thriller that quickly gained cult status on Netflix, introduces viewers to the disturbingly charming Joe Goldberg, a man whose idea of love crosses boundaries, defies laws, and disregards any sense of morality. Across its five seasons, You dissects the anatomy of a modern stalker disguised as a hopeless romantic. With each new victim, Joe descends deeper into the darkness of his psyche, dragging the audience along to question where obsession ends and love begins, and whether there’s ever truly a clear line between them.

Created by Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble, the series is based on the novels by Caroline Kepnes and blends first-person narration with psychological suspense to reveal how Joe views the world, always justified, always the victim of his circumstances. The script plays with perspective, often making the audience sympathize with a cold-blooded killer who believes he’s simply searching for connection.

Joe Goldberg is an ambiguous figure. At first glance, he’s introspective, intelligent, and seemingly sensitive. He works with books, quotes classic authors, listens to old music, and feels like the protagonist of a modern romance, until fascination turns into surveillance, and protectiveness into violence. Joe is an obsessive stalker with antisocial and narcissistic traits. His empathy is selective, and his moral compass deeply flawed. He genuinely believes his crimes are acts of love, which only makes him more dangerous.

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The women caught in Joe Goldberg’s web

Guinevere Beck — Joe’s first major obsession in season one. An aspiring writer, Beck is captivating and approachable, qualities Joe misinterprets as mutual attraction. He stalks her, invades her privacy, manipulates her relationships, and ultimately kills her when she discovers who he really is. Beck marks the start of Joe’s cycle: idealization, invasion, control, and destruction.

Candace Stone — Joe’s ex-girlfriend, presumed dead for much of the series. Candace returns in season two to expose him but is ultimately killed by Love Quinn. Her presence is a haunting reminder of Joe’s past, one he tries to erase but can’t escape.

Love Quinn — Introduced in season two, Love seems to be Joe’s perfect match: passionate, intense, and hiding dark secrets of her own. Their relationship becomes a battleground of emotional manipulation, where obsession meets its mirror image. When Joe tries to break free, Love proves equally dangerous. Her death at the end of season three marks a turning point: Joe finally confronts someone just as unhinged as he is.

Marienne Bellamy — A librarian and single mother, Marienne becomes Joe’s new project in season three. More emotionally guarded and self-aware, she poses a challenge. But once she senses the danger, she escapes, one of the few who survives. Her character serves as a moral anchor, making Joe’s actions all the more indefensible.

Kate Lockwood — In season four, Kate is a British art curator Joe meets while trying to redeem himself under a new identity. Unlike his previous targets, Kate is not easily swayed; she questions, challenges, and sees through him. Still, she’s drawn into his web. She represents Joe’s attempt to reenter society by masking his true nature behind charity work and polished appearances. Kate may be the most self-aware of his love interests, making her storyline both tense and emotionally rich.

Louise Brontë Flannery — Introduced in season five as someone seemingly interested in Joe, Louise has her own agenda: to avenge Beck’s death. Her arc closes the loop started in season one. When she exposes Joe to the world, he’s finally arrested and sentenced, bringing an apparent end to his cycle of manipulation.

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Between love and obsession: Joe’s psychological profile

Joe Goldberg isn’t just someone who falls in love, he falls into obsession, convinced that loving someone means owning them completely. He doesn’t see people as they are, but as characters in a story he’s trying to script, one where he controls every detail. His charm is disarming, even gentle at first, but it masks something darker: a hunger for control dressed up as romance. Joe convinces himself that his actions, even the cruelest, are justified, because he believes they come from devotion. But in his world, love leaves no space for the other person to simply exist. It’s not about sharing a life, it’s about taking one over.

At the same time, Joe is a product of childhood trauma, neglect, and violence, a fact the series often underscores. This doesn’t excuse his behavior but helps explain it. He’s constantly seeking belonging and meaning, but he does so by erasing others, metaphorically, by stripping away their autonomy, or literally, through murder. His psychological profile is both fascinating and deeply unsettling, reflecting real-world pathologies with frightening clarity.

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The danger of romanticizing toxicity

One of the most persistent criticisms of You is how easily it draws viewers into sympathizing with Joe. It speaks to a broader issue in pop culture: the glamorization of abusive behavior when wrapped in charm and good looks. Joe Goldberg is just another bad boy idealized by fiction, except he doesn’t just break hearts. He ends them.

The show tries to dismantle this idealization by showing the real consequences of Joe’s actions and amplifying the voices of his victims. Still, the fact that many fans continue to defend him reveals something deeper: a collective failure to recognize emotional abuse and toxic relationships for what they are. This blurred line between danger and desire is especially harmful for younger audiences, who may internalize distorted ideas about intimacy and affection.

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Behind the Mask: Archetypes and echoes

From a Jungian perspective, Joe embodies the Shadow, the repressed, darker aspects of the psyche that we all carry but rarely confront. He acts on unconscious urges, projecting onto his victims an idealized version of love that’s really just a reflection of his own emptiness. Each woman becomes a stand-in for what Joe longs to possess, purity, freedom, redemption, but he can’t handle them as autonomous beings.

Literarily, Joe stands in the lineage of characters like Humbert Humbert (Lolita), Tom Ripley (The Talented Mr. Ripley), and Patrick Bateman (American Psycho). All are unreliable narrators who pull readers into their distorted logic, whether through subtle manipulation or overt monstrosity. What sets Joe apart is the digital age: he stalks through screens, uses GPS trackers, hacks into lives. His brand of romance is old-fashioned, but his methods are disturbingly modern. He exists at the intersection of poetic melancholy and cold calculation.

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Joe Goldberg and real-life parallels

There’s something unsettling about how closely Joe’s story mirrors reality. His path doesn’t feel like fiction, it echoes the tactics of real killers like Ted Bundy, who used charm and looks as weapons.

Like Bundy, Joe appears educated, attractive, even trustworthy, until it’s far too late. He also recalls Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, whose crimes drew public fascination and even romantic admirers. It’s disturbing, but revealing. Joe’s character reflects our culture’s uneasy obsession with danger, and how easily we confuse charisma with kindness, especially when darkness is dressed in a smile.

By the end of five seasons, You leaves us with an uncomfortable question: why do we still root for Joe, even knowing what he is? Maybe it’s because he forces us to confront something we’d rather ignore, the shadow within ourselves, and our tendency to mistake obsession for love, control for care, and violence for passion. Or maybe it’s because his darkness feels just close enough to ours to recognize, but far enough to deny.