Fleabag Tore Us Apart And We Loved It

My insides have been eviscerated.

I’m DED.

My stomach hurts and maybe I’m dying.

It’s like this crushing pressure.

It’s just so painful. I cannot handle

I WILL LOVE YOU FOREVER AND THE REST OF MY LIFE WILL BE AGONY!

Just a few texts my friends and I have exchanged about a TV show we all love. In the devastating aftermath of Fleabag, season two, I am curious about what Fleabag did to us and why our collective emotional ruining is something it seems we were all longing for. Like little starving chicks in the nest, Pheobe Waller-Bridge came home to us and barfed up the meal we had been waiting for.

I will not spoil the show, well maybe I will, I haven’t decided yet, but I’ve had this ache in my stomach since scarfing down all six episodes in one sitting. At first, I thought, perhaps my feverish singleness created this ache. I watched two people fall in love with one another in impossible circumstances that doom the relationship. Whoops! I spoiled the show, but let’s be real, you’ve watched it, probably twice.

I thought perhaps my devastation was confirmation of an ever creeping position that perhaps love is impossible and there’s no chance for me or anyone else. You know, your run of the mill thoughts of single-girl who has devoted zero time to seeking out love but inevitably has a string of heartbreaks behind her which brought her to self-improvement and now she feels like she is out on an island because valuing oneself is a lonely fucking business, you know those thoughts. Ever the narcissist, I thought this ache was only in my ass.

But then those texts started coming through. I was by no means alone. The sad (and by sad I mean embarrassing for me) Instagram story I had posted about the ruin I felt from the show elicited a mass of responses from my friends and it didn’t stop there. The conversation has been endless. We all thought we would feel better by now. The show told us we would feel better by now, but we don’t.

The whole lot of us are in love with The Priest. We are in love with The Priest because he is hot. We are in love with The Priest because he is kind. We are in love with The Priest because he asks questions and is generous and is funny and is a little fucked up himself. But mostly we are in love with The Priest because he is hot. No, I’m just joking. The primary reason we are in love with the priest is that Fleabag is in love with The Preist, and we are Fleabag.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge brought the audience into Fleabag’s head in the first season by breaking the fourth wall. But Fleabag wasn’t being honest in the first season. In the second season, her attempt to be better lulled us into a false sense of security. The way one does when you try and be better yourself. You start to feel stronger, you start to feel like maybe you have a better handle on things, that you know how to stand on your own two feet, and you even know how to take a bit of a beating. But life has a funny way of throwing challenges your way in those moments, challenges that seem almost designed to shake the very core of what you thought you could handle. As if to say, “You thought you had this sorted, well let’s just see how sorted you actually are.” We are Fleabag and therefore we are experiencing it as if it’s happening to us. It’s a giant collective heartbreak.

It’s more than wanting what we can’t have. That is everywhere, in every show. It’s a clear theme but it’s not the whole story. I think the effect is more in the loss of it. I could bear the experience of wanting the unavailable Priest. But loving The Priest, feeling the depth of that, and having it taken away is the real ache. We don’t just want to fuck The Priest, we want to love The Priest. We want a world where love gets to save us. This show reveals more about a collective desire for kind of love that feels unavailable to many of us.

I’ve read through many of the reviews and reactions to The Priest and I find myself landing on a very simple reality. Fleabag hits us where it hurts. It makes us feel like we’ve been seen in all our rawness and we are grateful for the opportunity to feel the hurts we tuck away in our pockets to gather lint, and eventually go through the wash with our jeans, and come out unrecognizable. Fleabag pulls these hurts out of our pockets, gently unfolds them for us, and holds our hand while we cry. And while it’s painful as fuck we love it because we know we are not alone.

I’m writing this to get rid of this feeling, or at the very least ask for you to agree with me so that I don’t feel so alone with this aching, bleeding, oozing hole Fleabag left in my ass.

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash