echo and narcissus

what is love if it is not obsession?

Echo and Narcissus, John William Waterhouse

It begins, as most things do, with a misapprehension. Echo, the girl with a voice too large for her body, sees Narcissus, a boy beautiful enough to be mistaken for a god, and believes this moment will alter the trajectory of her life. What she does not know, what none of us know in those fevered seconds, is that her life had already been altered by the unbearable burden of her existence. We never see these moments for what they are: collisions. Echo does not truly love Narcissus, but she believes she does because she cannot separate the swell of her own longing from the object it attaches to.

We were taught as children to call it love when we feel nervous butterflies in our stomachs, when we feel that ache in our chest, that relentless pull toward someone who embodies our most desperate desires. But isn’t it more honest to call it obsession? Echo did not love Narcissus; she became consumed by the idea of him, a phantom of perfection that she could never touch or possess. She reduced herself to his contours and became only the response to his declarations. Her voice was his orbit, his tether. It was never him she loved, but the way his presence filled her emptiness, her soul.

Echo’s story is one we know too well, a tale worn smooth by its countless retellings in the silent moments of our own lives. She chased after Narcissus, drawn by the magnetism of his beauty, ignoring the plain truth that he did not want her. She followed him through the woods, repeating his words back to him, hoping he might hear in her voice the same ache that burned in her chest. But love cannot be conjured from the empty spaces between two people. Narcissus saw her and turned away, not out of malice but indifference. Still, Echo stayed, clinging to the fantasy that her persistence might one day be rewarded—this fantasy was her doom. She dwindled into the open void, leaving only her voice behind, a haunted spirit of what she once was.

We see her and shake our heads, pitying her desperation. How foolish, we think, to chase someone so clearly unwilling to meet her where she stood. We know she deserved better, deserved someone who would recognise her worth and give her the love she craved. And yet, even as we condemn her choices, we replicate them. We find ourselves drawn to the ones who will not—cannot—love us back. We fall for their mystery, their inaccessibility, mistaking their distance for depth. We tell ourselves that we are different, that we can break through their walls, and that they will love us because we are persistent enough, patient enough, kind, pretty and “worthy” enough.

And so, the cycle continues. We become Echo, chasing after strangers, pouring our energy into someone who cannot hold it, will not hold it. We watch as they drift further away, knowing somewhere deep inside that this story ends in our own undoing, and yet we cannot stop ourselves. The pull is too strong, the illusion too enticing. We tell ourselves that this time will be different, that this person will see us, hear us, choose us. We are not chasing love; we are chasing a mirror of our insecurities, our fears of unworthiness, our own need to feel alive through the act of pursuit.

The tragedy is not that we go after the wrong people, but that we do so knowing better. We can recognise Echo’s folly and still fall victim to it, because to know better does not always mean to do better. To love is to be vulnerable, and to chase after someone who cannot love us back is, paradoxically, the safest form of vulnerability. We risk nothing but the heartbreak we already expect. It is easier to live in the cycle of unrequited love than open ourselves to the terrifying possibility of being truly seen, truly loved, cherished, and truly known, by someone who might actually stay.

Narcissus is also an echo, caught in a mirror’s pull. He does not love himself—not truly. Love requires a kind of generosity that he is incapable of; it demands the recognition of the beloved as both subject and object. Narcissus looks into the lake and sees beauty, but what he loves is not the face itself—it is the idea of being loved, the validation of his perfection. His face in the water is an abstraction, a symbol, a reflection of what he has always feared—love is impossible unless it is first earned. And so, he leans closer and closer, chasing a mirage until it consumes him.

The tragedy of Narcissus lies not in his beauty but in how he becomes ensnared by it, unable to distinguish between himself and the world around him. When he sees his reflection in the pool, he believes he has found another, someone who finally understands his perfection, his solitude. His reflection is an illusion, a cruel mimicry of connection. Narcissus does not love the person in the water because love requires recognising something beyond oneself. Instead, he is obsessed with the idea of being seen and adored, even if it is only by his own reflection. His fixation traps him in an endless loop of yearning, a closed circuit that feeds his vanity but starves his soul.

Narcissus’ story is tragic, not just cause of his death but the emptiness that precedes it. To be so consumed with oneself is to exist in isolation, to never reach beyond the surface of what is real. The reflection he cherishes is an echo of his own image, incapable of returning the love he so desperately seeks. Narcissus was not killed by his beauty but by his inability to step outside of it, to see that love is not a mirror but a bridge. He withers away, captivated by a dream he can never touch, leaving behind nothing but a flower—a symbol of the life he might have had if only he had looked up.

We are no different, really. We tell ourselves that love is something holy, something transcendent, and yet we confuse it with possession, obsession, and the simple need to be seen. How many of us have mistaken the thrill of infatuation for a soulmate’s arrival? How many have conflated longing with love? We become Echoes, mimicking the sounds of the people we desire, erasing our voices to accommodate theirs, until we are no longer ourselves but pale copycats, repetitions of someone else’s words. Or we become Narcissus, infatuated with the way another person reflects back our best qualities, not seeing them for why they are but for what they can do or mean to us.

It is human nature to collapse love and obsession, to flatten the lines of connection into something easier to grasp. Obsession is a closed loop, a narrative we write alone, where the beloved is not a person but a symbol of what we lack. Love is unruly and unpredictable. It does not fit neatly into the shapes of our expectations. It is not about completing one another but about standing side by side, whole and imperfect. Clarity is rare, and obsession is seductive. Echo fades into the forest and caves because she cannot untangle herself from the need to be heard. Narcissus vanishes into the stillness of the pool because he cannot let go of the illusion that his reflection holds the answer to his longing. Both are consumed not by love but by the absence of it, by the obsession, by their false perceptions and unbearable weights of their own solitude.

The myth is a warning. It tells us that love is not a desperate chase of something we can never have, nor is it worshipping reflections that confirm our worth. Love is the quiet act of stepping outside ourselves, of seeing another person not as a mirror or an echo but as a world unto themselves. It is terrifying in its simplicity, its ordinariness. And yet, it is one of the only things that can save us from ourselves. We forget this, of course. We mistake obsession for passion, crushes for soulmates, mirrors for windows. We tell ourselves love stories that are really about loneliness, and we wonder why they end in tragedy. We become Echo, we become Narcissus, and we forget that to love is not to lose ourselves but to find something greater than our own warped reflections.

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“Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.” — Wystan Hugh Auden