Echo and Narcissus: A Lonely Love Story
A Greek Myth for February (and the Rest of the Year)
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” -James Baldwin
It’s February, so I think I’m legally required to talk about love and relationships.
How about we start with the classic greek tragedy: Echo and Narcissus.
We are usually told this is a story about vanity.
About self-love gone wrong.
A warning tale for people who admire themselves too much.
But that reading is too easy. And frankly, too kind.
If this were simply a story about arrogance, it would give us a villain and a moral. Do not be like Narcissus. Love others more. Put the mirror down.
The myth refuses.
This is not a story about vanity.
It is a story about loneliness.
In the old telling, Echo is cursed to repeat only the last words spoken to her. She cannot initiate. She cannot shape her own meaning. She can only respond.
And yet she loves.
She listens.
She adapts.
She mirrors.
She survives by attunement.
Echo follows Narcissus not to trap him or possess him, but simply to be near. When he speaks, she hears him. When he calls out, she answers with the only language she has left.
Her tragedy is not silence.
It is constraint.
Echo does not lack words.
She lacks permission.
She represents the silenced self.
Those shaped by systems where voice was unsafe.
Those who learned that connection required disappearance.
She learned to listen first.
Then to speak carefully.
And eventually, not at all.
Narcissus, by contrast, speaks constantly. In the myth, he talks to the forest, to the water, to his own reflection. He is surrounded by sound, including his own.
He does not listen because he has never needed to.
He speaks.
He performs.
He is endlessly responsive to himself.
What we miss if we rush to condemn him is this: Narcissus does not reject Echo. He cannot perceive her.
His tragedy is not vanity.
It is captivity.
The world reaches him only after passing through his own image. He confuses reflection with relationship, familiarity with intimacy.
This is where the story begins to feel uncomfortably familiar.
If Echo and Narcissus lived today, they would not be wandering a forest.
They would be sitting across from each other.
Narcissus would be looking at his phone. Not obsessively. Just constantly. The glow would feel reassuring. Each scroll would offer him back his own thoughts, his own image, his own worth.
Echo would be watching his face.
She would nod at the right moments. Laugh half a beat late. When she spoke, she would listen carefully for his response so she could return it to him, softened, familiar, safe.
He would not be cruel.
He would not even seem distracted.
He would simply be elsewhere.
Echo might text him later, then reread the message three times, wondering if it sounded like too much. When he replied with a thinner version of her own words, she would feel a strange relief.
He heard me.
Narcissus would post something vulnerable. The likes would come quickly. He would feel briefly known.
Echo would be in the room.
If this feels familiar, it’s because many of us have been Echo.
And many of us, if we’re honest, have been Narcissus too.
We are living inside the myth.
I know I am.
I see this all the time in couples work.
One partner so absorbed in their own reflection, their own story, their own wounds, that they cannot see anything in the relationship beyond themselves. Not because they are malicious. Often because they are terrified. Being right feels safer than being open. Certainty feels safer than listening. They want connection, but only on terms that do not require interruption.
They are not unavailable because they don’t care.
They are unavailable because they would rather protect their identity than risk being changed.
And then there is the other partner. The one with Echo’s voice.
So careful. So attuned. So practiced at saying not the true thing, but the pleasing thing. They smooth every edge, soften every sentence, anticipate every reaction. They call it love. Sometimes it is. But over time, something hollows out.
They abandon themselves so thoroughly that they leave their partner with almost nothing to love.
The tragedy is that both believe they are doing what the relationship requires. One by holding tightly to the self. The other by disappearing for the sake of peace. And in different ways, both exit the room.
I see this dynamic beyond the therapy room too.
I see it in society. In how fiercely we protect our identities. How tightly we cling to who we voted for, the tribe we belong to, the story we repeat. How afraid we are of being wrong, or worse, of being exiled.
So we keep talking.
And keep posting.
And keep repeating the safest version of ourselves.
We mirror the narrative around us, even when it no longer fits the suffering in front of us. Even when our well-laid plans stop working. Even when someone nearby is hurting and all we can see is our own reflection.
Not because we are cruel.
Because we are afraid of losing our place.
This is why loneliness keeps rising, even among people with full calendars and busy lives.
Which suggests the problem is not isolation.
We are not alone.
We are unrecognized.
Psychologists have been circling this for years. What protects us from loneliness is not contact, but responsiveness: the felt sense of being seen, understood, answered. Feeling accurately known matters more than proximity or frequency.
Which helps explain something the myth already knew.
Echo had proximity.
Narcissus had attention.
What they lacked was mutual recognition.
We’ve treated loneliness as a logistical problem.
How many friends.
How many interactions.
How much contact.
But love isn’t a numbers game. It’s a meeting.
The philosopher Martin Buber described love not as a feeling but as an I–Thou encounter, where the other is not an object, not a reflection, not an extension of the self, but a presence who can interrupt us.
That interruption is costly.
It requires us to pause our performance.
To risk being changed by what we hear.
Neuroscience backs this up in its own quiet way. When one person consistently attunes while the other remains self-referential, the cost isn’t just emotional. The attuned body carries more stress over time. Love can be present and still quietly drain the one who keeps listening.
Which is why love so often fails even when affection is real.
Love can be present.
And still not land.
The tragedy of Echo and Narcissus is not the absence of love.
It is love with nowhere to land.
Echo fades until only her voice remains.
Narcissus dies reaching for himself.
Both are lonely.
Both are loved.
Neither is met.
The mystic Simone Weil wrote that attention, taken to its highest degree, is prayer. To attend to another person without consuming them, without using them to stabilize the self, is a spiritual act.
Which means the opposite of loneliness is not company.
It is courage.
The courage to listen without absorbing.
The courage to speak without disappearing.
The courage to notice when love is present but unreachable.
Because some relationships do not fail for lack of affection.
They fail because recognition never arrives.
Because one person keeps echoing.
Because the other never quite looks up from the water.
Echo does not vanish because she is weak.
She vanishes because she stays too long in a place where her voice cannot land.
And there is a quiet dignity in knowing when listening has become erasure.
In knowing when waiting has turned into vanishing.
Leaving, in that sense, is not abandonment.
It is fidelity to the self that still hopes to be met.
The monk Thomas Merton warned that we spend much of our lives clinging to images of ourselves. Love asks us to loosen that grip. To let the other be other. To step out of the pool.
Echo survives not as a body, but as resonance.
She lives wherever someone speaks and waits to be heard.
She lives wherever someone decides that love must be mutual to be real.
The myth does not instruct.
It asks.
Will we keep mistaking reflection for relationship?
Or will we risk the harder work of recognition?
Because love does not begin when someone mirrors us back.
It begins when something unfamiliar reaches us, and we stay.
Or when we realize we cannot,
and choose not to disappear trying.