The Deep Dive: Too Much
Can you love someone else if you don't love yourself?
This piece contains spoilers for Too Much
We are often told that you can’t love someone else until you love yourself. It’s a noble idea, but a double-edged sword: in today’s cultural climate, where “healed” perfection is bandied about as the only viable state from which we will be able to live a good life, hearing this phrase over and over can simply make us feel as though we have failed at not one thing but two. We fall first at the “loving ourselves” hurdle and then skid painfully along the ground towards “loving someone else”.
In practice, this idea - of which both the burden and the promised benefits fall overwhelmingly on women - takes a particular form online and in the culture we consume. Spending a lot of time alone; being comfortable with being single to the paradoxical extent that you must “date” and “romance” yourself; going “no contact” with friends or family who may have hurt you in order to “protect your peace” - all of these activities seem to feature prominently in the mainstream self-love pipeline. It’s limiting and reductive and tedious, and, luckily, because culture moves fast in the digital era, has already become something of a parody.
Yet like many other things that have become tedious and parodied within the online zeitgeist, the fundamental idea of self-love as a gateway to better relationships and a more fulfilling life is undeniably powerful - and true. The relationship we have with ourselves is the most significant of our lives; it in turn affects how we relate to others. But it goes both ways. And what is much less common is the acknowledgement of the fact that it’s a lot easier to love yourself when someone else loves you first. Love begets love.
This, I think, is the overriding takeaway from Lena Dunham’s Netflix series Too Much, released earlier this year. Watching the show, a contemporary romcom inspired by Dunham’s own relationship with her husband and co-creator Luis Felber, I was struck by how she navigates the nuances of love’s peculiar and intricate interplay with our love (or lack thereof) for ourselves.
It would be possible to frame the show as a fairytale romance, which Too Much nods to in its Jane-Austen-fantasy scenes, the leads suddenly dressed in Regency garb for a split second. Jessica (Megan Stalter) is an advertising producer in her 30s who, fresh out of a long-term relationship with a man who is wont to remind her that she’s “not Gigi Hadid”, is sent from New York to the London office to regain her lost mojo. On her first night in the city she meets Felix (Will Sharpe), an indie musician who looks like a fuckboy but turns out to have a heart of gold. They begin an intense relationship that weaves its way towards a happy ending.
This is perhaps why Too Much has had a lukewarm reception. It lacks some of the grit and realism of Dunham’s seminal 2010s show Girls: it feels fantastical somehow, a bit shiny, a bit on the nose. But there are layers of depth to explore here. Because all the while, Jessica is tangled in another relationship. To make sense of her thoughts and feelings as she processes her break-up with the unfavourable Zev (Michael Zegen), she makes videos addressed to Wendy Jones, the woman he left her for and swiftly proposed to, who is, as a stick-thin, glossy-haired, female-lizard-owning, custom-knitwear-making influencer, everything Jessica isn’t (she’s played with that-girl insouciance by the model Emily Ratajkowski). Jessica has come to London, she tells Wendy, “to release you” - an obsession that is preventing her from moving forward.
And so Too Much isn’t quite a fairytale - but nor is it a clinical story of red flags and dealbreakers and attachment styles. It’s about love on every level - and it shows us the complexity of “self-love” in two key ways. The first is through Jessica’s relationship with Felix, which shows us that you really can love someone else if you don’t fully love yourself - and that receiving love in return can make you more accepting of your own flaws. The second is through her relationship with Wendy - which I think can be read as Jessica’s relationship with herself. There, Jessica shows us that if you can find a way to love yourself a little more, the business of loving someone else becomes that bit easier.
Jessica is far from “healed” when she meets Felix. She’s grieving her relationship, she’s chaotic, she’s volatile, she wears enormous nighties and accidentally sets herself on fire with a candle. Yes, she has a certain lack of apology to her, central to which is the fact that in London she seems wholly foreign - “I’m American, we love feelings!” she says to tempt an untalkative guest at a wedding out of their shell - but she had that in her relationship with Zev. She is self-professedly intense and every bit as lost (arguably more so) in London as she was in New York.
The difference here is that Felix is completely unfazed by any of it. Perhaps she wants to do things differently, too - “I would normally try to hide this look from you, but fuck it, this is who I am,” she says of her white poplin nightgown that flows to her ankles - but this is the kind of slightly highly strung, covert reassurance-seeking that often comes out of her mouth. It’s Felix’s reaction that changes things: rather than jumping to her aid or responding defensively, he simply looks at her, expressionless. Later, in an argument, Felix tells her she’s “too much”, but he clarifies it’s not in a bad way. “Just the right amount, and then a little bit more,” he explains; he’s able to make room for that “little bit more” no matter how annoying he finds it.
In Jessica’s interactions with both Felix and Zev we see that, unlike them, she is in a war with herself. She is constantly toeing the line between insecurity and confidence, instability and aliveness, and then questioning where she falls - a state familiar to many women. Depending on your outlook, such introspectiveness could come off as tiresomely narcissistic, or simply necessary to fight years of internalised patriarchal oppression; I think it’s probably a bit of both. “I used to feel so special about me - but now I really don’t,” she weeps as she breaks up with Zev.
No such pressure to “feel special” about themselves seems to plague the men; nor does their sense of worth depend on how Jessica feels about them. “I’ve told you I’m a fucking piece of shit,” says Felix during an argument. It’s sad, but uncomplicated: Felix hates himself more than Jessica hates herself, but he doesn’t feel a duty to love himself, either; similarly, he loves Jessica even though he fully sees her many flaws. “You’re still the same fucking bitch that came from New York,” he says in the same argument. She responds: “You’re not allowed to call me a bitch! I’m good, I’m special and I’m bright!” Implicit in her “not allowing” him to call her a bitch is that it must preclude his love for her. Felix, the self-professed piece of shit, thinks nothing of the sort - and Jessica eventually sees, I think, that she can be all of the above.
It’s Felix’s acknowledgement of his own darkness - in stark contrast with Zev’s prickly arrogance - that facilitates a mutual dynamic of visibility and acceptance. Jess moves to London not trusting herself: “These people must know better than me - everyone must know better than me,” she tells Wendy, as she googles lists of red flags in a partner. But Felix gently pushes her to. In a particularly poignant episode in which Jess and Felix stay up all night talking and having sex, they collide at 4am in the bathroom. Jess inadvertently seeks reassurance about her body; Felix is confused, and firm in not taking the bait. “You’re sexy. You know you’re sexy,” he says, not withholding, not overly giving. “It’s like I want the affirmation but I’m also like… yeah, I know,” she responds. She doesn’t need him to tell her - but it helps if he tells her she doesn’t need him.
In another moment of friction with Felix, when Jess dresses up in lingerie and he tells her he’s not in the mood, things start to escalate. “I told you you look fucking amazing and I meant it - sometimes it feels like you’re fighting with someone who isn’t even here,” he says. That person, in her mind, is Wendy, or Zev, but really it’s herself - a hidden part fuelled by shame and anxiety that she’s trying to exorcise through unhinged vlogging in toilet cubicles. The fantasy version of Wendy that she sees online (a typical “cool girl”, feminine and beautiful but untouched by womanly hysteria) casts in all too clear a light the ways in which Jessica is too much, or not enough. No wonder she’s so angry with her.
This will be a pattern familiar to many of us: a fixation in the form of admiration or hatred of someone who is, in some ways, just like us - Wendy is, after all dating Zev and living in Jess’s old apartment - but different in what feel like all the important ones. Put simply, it’s jealousy - a resentment of another person because they have something we don’t - but its portrayal here through parasocial interactions shows how often the feeling can be fuelled by something going on entirely in our own heads. An ex partner’s new partner is, of course, a common vessel for this projection - but friends, family members, colleagues and celebrities are just as vulnerable.
Jessica stops filming herself talking to Wendy as she grows comfortable with Felix - and then slips back into old habits when they fight. Eventually, disaster strikes: Jess realises that she has been posting the videos publicly on Instagram the whole time, and she has gone viral. At a Christmas advert shoot - the culmination of the workplace subplot that is necessary but ultimately unexciting - Jess confesses what’s happened in a panicked outpouring to Rita Ora in an elf suit (one of the more whimsical moments of the series) and made to see just how insignificant it all is. “Who the fuck is Wendy Jones?” says Rita - well, quite.
I love the ending of Too Much because we find out exactly the answer to this question. Wendy asks Jessica if they can meet up in London to reconcile - and it turns out that Zev is as awful to her as he was to Jessica. It’s the final piece of information she needs to move on: that having all those traits she so clearly lacks doesn’t mean anything works out better. That Wendy is just a person, too. That “my joy is not going to come from his destruction or yours”. That all this time, “Wendy” was really just a part of herself she couldn’t accept, an overly loud inner voice that wouldn’t shut up.
A few months after Dunham broke up with the music producer Jack Antonoff at the end of 2017, she wrote about her experiences for Vogue: “If I were being didactic I would say that this, this pure and fiery solitude, is the time in which women form themselves - and that a patriarchal society has removed that privilege from us through the threat of eternal loneliness as a penance for the sin of loving yourself.” What a sentence. What a sentiment. But it strikes me that Too Much shows us how that solitude doesn’t have to be extreme. By the end, Jessica is not alone - but she is alone in her head, free of the tyranny of her imagined Wendy. Jessica has made space for herself at the same time as giving love to - and receiving it from - someone else.
In one shot of grey, rainy London, we see a huge sign over a railway that reads: “Love is the running towards”. Too Much says that’s what we should all be doing. And that it might just be possible to jump two hurdles in one.