Fleabag’s encounter with the Priest takes place at a time when she is still immersed in mourning following the losses of her mother and her closest friend, Boo. For this reason, reading their relationship simply as an “impossible love” would be reductive.
In the aftermath of these losses, Fleabag has not yet been able to fully mourn. She is struggling with guilt, anger, longing, and aggression directed toward herself. In her relationship with the Priest, she forms a genuine intimacy with another person in which she is able to withdraw many of her defenses. She can remain vulnerable without having to hide it; the Priest sees her as she is. For Fleabag, who has rarely felt truly seen by anyone, the space opened up by this relationship is deeply significant. Everyone—and perhaps her father most of all—seems to regard her as difficult or maladjusted, whereas the Priest loves her precisely in these aspects of herself. Throughout the series, he is also the only character who notices that she is breaking the fourth wall.
Fleabag’s ability to see the Priest not merely as the person who sees her, but as a person with his own conflicts, impasses, and vulnerabilities, turns their relationship into a genuine encounter. They find in one another a kind of intimacy, recognition, and possibility for relating that is rare to come by. As viewers, we find ourselves wishing that, despite all the impossibilities, they could somehow hold on to this relationship. Because what we are witnessing is a genuine intimacy, even if it cannot be sustained.
What deserves perhaps the most reflection in the story of these two characters is mourning. Losses, separations, and the mourning we are able to do for them cause pain, but they also contribute to our growth. Beginning with our earliest objects, we gradually lose many of the things that make our relationship with ourselves and with the world possible. To find one’s own way is, to some extent, to become capable of living with what can no longer be brought back.
In this sense, some relationships become spaces in which previously unprocessed mourning can be reenacted. The loved person enters the subject’s psychic world both as themselves and as someone who carries traces of objects lost in the past. Love, in this sense, may be not only a turning toward a new object, but also a way of encountering one’s own history of objects once again.
This is part of what makes the relationship between Fleabag and the Priest so compelling. They establish a deeply intimate and reciprocal connection, yet this intimacy cannot become a relationship in which they choose to build a life together. The Priest remains within the life he has chosen, while Fleabag is left to confront his absence. Moreover, the impossibility of their relationship is not an obstacle that emerges later; it is a boundary the relationship has carried from the very beginning. They can see one another, but they cannot build a shared life.
The end of the relationship is therefore more than a romantic disappointment. For Fleabag, it is the experience of another profound loss. The Priest becomes part of a psychic history already marked by earlier losses, and his loss reawakens them. We see Fleabag both suffer and, at the same time, come to accept the path the Priest has chosen.
When a person becomes able to remain with the absence of the object in experiences of loss, they can begin to mourn rather than deny the loss or replace what has been lost with a substitute. We do not know whether Fleabag is able to mourn this time. Perhaps this is one of the most important questions the series leaves us with:
Has Fleabag, through the loss of the Priest, reached a place where she can carry not only the loss of him, but also the earlier losses that have been reawakened alongside him—where she can live with his absence and allow herself to mourn?
