WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS.
A few weeks ago, I immersed myself in a new Netflix show, You. Based on the best-selling novel by Caroline Kepnes, You trails Joe, a typical book store manager (and psychopath) who becomes obsessed with an emerging writer and poet, Guinevere Beck. By following her everywhere, checking her highly public social media, and stealing her phone and laptop, Joe stalks Beck every minute of the day. He learns about her passions, family, social life, and insecurities. With this information—and a few murders—he is able to manipulate her into a relationship. There are ten different articles I could write about You, specifically about abusive and manipulative relationships. However, one lesson we can learn in You is that our privacy can be close to nonexistent in the modern dating world.
You provides an interesting commentary on the state of dating in the age of social media. It is safe to say that social media has become an outlet to show off our everyday lives. While most of us are not psychopaths, You suggests there may be a little bit of Joe in all of us. We have all have used social media to check someone out—a mutual friend, an ex, maybe even our teachers and professors. We use it to gain insight into who these people are. Employers do it all the time to unofficially background check a potential hire. At the end of Season 1, even Beck, the victim, becomes obsessed with Joe’s social media. She uses it as a resource to decode who he was before her.
When Joe and Beck break up temporarily, they both stalk each other to keep tabs on how the other person is doing. Beck stalks Joe’s new girlfriend, Karen, online to gain insight into their new relationship. Joe claims he feels secure in his new relationship with Karen as long as he is able to stalk Beck online. He narrates in the beginning of episode 8, “I hardly look at your Facebook. Two or three times a day max.” This is more evident when Beck deletes her Facebook to help her write, and Joe goes berserk. “How the hell am I supposed to be great with you being gone if you’re actually gone?”
Social media makes dating and breaking up much harder than it used to be. The number one advice we all seem to hear during a break up is to mute or remove the person off social media. It hurts too much to be on the outside of a life you were once so heavily involved in. It’s difficult to do so at first, but once one stops looking constantly at what the other person is up to, they eventually stop caring. Removing, or even simply muting each other on social media is something that Beck and Joe fail to do in order to properly move on.
Beck and Joe struggle with the temptations that social media provides us in the dating world, but Joe is clearly the one who takes it too far, tragically leading to her death. In the end, You creepily shows us to be careful of what we post on our social media—because we never know who is checking it out.