CHOSEN: A Psychological Analysis of Buffy’s Relationships
Angel: True* Love (Mythic)
I put an asterisk next to true because I’m not using the word true in the sense of something being truthful. I’m using it in the sense of something being ideal, of being pure.
But that’s the thing — purity is an illusion. Buffy’s love for Angel emanates from a truthful part of the soul — from the part of her that believes in redemption and goodness, even in the face of darkness.
Buffy’s greatest superpower is not her strength or speed or cunning: it’s her ability to locate humanity in everyone and every thing. Even for all of her self-righteousness and moralizing, Buffy lives and loves in the gray.
Buffy and Angel express that they are in love with each other — Buffy to Willow, Angel to Giles — before they even really know each other.
This is a love built from mythology. For Angel, Buffy represents purity and his lost humanity. For Buffy, Angel represents her lost innocence, and the opportunity for light and dark to exist as one.
This is why Buffy is the one who initiates sexual contact with Angel and also why he turns evil after this act. Sex is a loss of control — something they both desire and both fear.
Buffy wishes to touch darkness without engaging with her own. Angel wishes to touch light without believing he is actually worthy of it.
This is why their relationship fails the moment it is consummated: it is a love built on purity, idealization, and fantasy. It is love in theory, not in practice.
After Angel returns in season three, the next year is one long negotiation with reality — Angel negotiating with the truth of who he is and what he wants, and Buffy negotiating with her desires and what she can endure in the name of love.
During their breakup, Buffy says, "I can’t change. I’m never gonna change."
This is the defiant cry of a young woman on the brink of adulthood wishing to not have to face the solemn and heartbreaking reality that love alone is not enough.
Ultimately, this is the true moment that Buffy must accept and begin to grieve her loss of innocence.
Angel is not the person who can show Buffy what it means for darkness and light to exist as one. His attempts at this are too steeped in shame, too perfect, too clean. The person who can show Buffy this is the person who lives in the gray — the person who is willing to make a mess…
"What did this?"
"Spike…"
Riley: Acceptable Love (Conditional)
This is yet another attempt on Buffy's part to negotiate with reality.
Initially, Buffy does not want Riley to know about her being The Slayer at all. And when he finds out, she immediately tries to end things.
Buffy is, in essence, disowning this part of herself. She believes her interactions with darkness make her unworthy of a stable, "normal" love. She expresses it as a matter of circumstance, of material risk — but as Riley rightly points out, what she's truly afraid of is opening herself up to emotional risk, loss, and rejection.
Ostensibly, she lets Riley into her life, but she never fully allows him into her heart. She allows herself to pursue her human desires — connection, belonging, sexual intimacy — without shame, but she never fully engages with the true origins of her darkness: her fears of rejection, abandonment, emotional weakness, death, and loss.
Riley's need to be needed, to be useful, collides with Buffy's emotional armor.
Unlike with Spike, Buffy never allows Riley to experience her capacity for cruelty, rage, self-righteousness, and superiority. She knows he can't hold all of those parts of her. As a result, he's also cut off from the depths of her capacity for radical kindness, tenderness, self-doubt, and vulnerability. He cannot hold her shadow, so he never gets the fullness of her light.
Their love is conditioned upon the illusion of normalcy and acceptable functioning.
Which is why Buffy needs to taste the depths of her own dysfunction in order to obtain functional, adult love.
"I may be dirt, but you're the one that likes to roll in it."
Spike: Real Love (Transformative)
Spike is the only person in Buffy's life who is capable of holding her in her entirety.
Ironically, he often refers to her as "Slayer," but he is the one who sees Buffy the person most clearly, most completely. He doesn't think of her being The Slayer as an endless burden (like Angel does) or as something she can switch on or off as is convenient (like Riley). Spike understands that being The Slayer is part of Buffy's essence, and he embraces it and all that comes with it.
Angel attempts to spare Buffy her darkness as a means by which to spare himself his own. Riley attempts to interact with Buffy's darkness out of fascination with his own. Spike embraces Buffy's darkness the way he embraces his own.
Buffy's love for Spike forces her to stretch herself beyond all of her limits. Buffy's relationship with Spike tests her morality, her identity, her self-concept, and her capacity for ambiguity, compassion, forgiveness, and, most importantly, faith.
Spike is the ultimate test of Buffy's belief in love and humanity. He is the only person she allows herself to be loved by when she feels unworthy of love. And he is the mirror that forces her to confront all the parts of herself she disowns and finds unlovable.
He is the only person who has the capacity to grow alongside her through all eras of her life. In their major moment of rupture, after his attack, he knows he has reached his own capacity for growth while existing in his current identity.
He allows part of himself he treasures — his rebellious darkness — to die in order to be reborn in love. And in doing so, allows Buffy to do the same. Through loving Spike, Buffy allows herself to be released from a role she treasures — namely being the singular, enduring source of light in the dark.
She spreads that burden and responsibility to Faith, Willow, the Potential Slayers, and most of all to Spike. She allows him to be The Champion, the bringer of light to the dark.
When she tells him she loves him, he is the one bathed in light and she is the one standing in shadow, illuminated by him. By his love.
When Spike tells Buffy she doesn't love him, it's not because he doesn't believe that she does — but rather an acknowledgment that she doesn't yet fully understand what she's saying.
Spike surrendered himself completely to love. By the end of the series, Buffy's not quite there just yet. She's still baking.
But she and Spike have worked together to give her the opportunity she's always longed for but has been too afraid to embrace: the chance to choose herself instead of being simply Chosen.
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