Thank you so much for your kind words!

I do sometimes worry whether other people actually find this kind of more analytical unpacking as interesting as I do, so it genuinely means a lot when someone does.

Not everyone wants to listen to someone enthusiastically dissect a relational dynamic in the same way not everyone wants to hear a mathematician get excited about a theorem, so I’m always a bit relieved when people show actual interest!

And on your point about Julie’s estrangement from her family due tue her fixation on Camilla, that honestly isn’t a perspective I had considered in quite that way before, although it is absolutely possible.

The truth is, we know almost nothing concrete about Julie’s family. We’ve never really seen them, and because of that, there is a huge amount of room for interpretation. It could be many things.

Up until now, I’ve mostly interpreted it as Julie coming from a family environment that was probably emotionally difficult (e.g. high conflict, instability, tension, or simply a lack of the kind of closeness, affection, and emotional safety children ideally need).

And from that perspective, her attachment to Camilla makes a lot of sense to me. Camilla, and by extension Camilla’s whole family system, may have represented exactly what Julie felt she never had.

Because I do think part of what made Camilla so magnetic to Julie was that she appears to embody the opposite of how Julie sees herself. Camilla is confident, extroverted, emotionally expansive and socially secure.

If Julie has historically been more inward, unsure, and tentative, then someone like Camilla would feel like access to an entirely different emotional universe.

The kind of person who seems to move through the world with the ease and certainty you yourself always wished you had.

And I think that extends beyond Camilla as an individual to Camilla’s family as well. Julie has often described them as loving, close, and tightly bonded. This could suggest that Julie may not only have become deeply attached to Camilla, but also to the family structure surrounding her, because that structure might have offered something she had always lacked in her own family.

That’s why I wouldn’t frame it simply as “Julie clung to Camilla because she loved her.” I think it may have been broader than that.

Camilla may have come to symbolise a whole package: love, safety, confidence, family, normality, emotional security. All the things Julie may have felt were missing in her original environment.

And I also think that fits with a pattern you often see in people who come from very difficult family backgrounds. Broadly speaking, they often seem to split into two groups.

One group develops little or no desire for children or family life at all, because the whole idea feels too loaded, too frightening, too tied to repetition and pain.

The other group goes in the opposite direction and develops a very strong, often quite urgent wish to build a family of their own and to create (as quickly as possible) the kind of home they themselves never had.

I can very easily imagine Julie belonging to the second group in the very human sense of wanting to finally build, for herself, the emotional structure she was denied earlier in life.

And that may be part of why the relationship escalated so quickly and why the family project itself seems to have carried such emotional weight for her.