"On My Own": How a Small Les Misérables Moment Became a Cultural Anchor

I came to Les Misérables late enough that it felt almost embarrassing to admit it. By the time I finally saw the show, most people I knew had long since chosen their favorite Valjean, sworn allegiance to one particular recording, and could quote the barricade scenes with a kind of devotional fluency. I didn’t have that history. I missed the original-cast waves, the Broadway revival discourse, and the amateur-production debates over keys and cuts. My first encounter with On My Own wasn’t theatrical at all. It was on Dawson’s Creek, of all places, dropped into a moment engineered for maximum adolescent ache. There was no attempt to fold the song into its original context; the show used it the way teen dramas so often did back then, as a pressure valve for emotions the characters weren’t mature enough to articulate. And because the scene played it straight, without winking or hedging, the song hit me before I understood anything about the world it came from. The earnestness of the moment, however constructed, hooked me immediately.

What struck me at the time wasn’t the romance; it was the posture. The show framed the song not as a confession to another character, but as something closer to a confession to oneself, the kind you stage in private because it’s the only place the truth can survive. There was an entire emotional philosophy there, one I recognized from the contours of adolescence, even if I lacked the vocabulary for it. And when I eventually saw Les Mis and realized how small this piece of music is within the whole machinery of the story, the contrast was stark. The song that felt cavernous on television lasted barely long enough to fully exhale on stage. It was a sliver of personal longing wedged between political urgency and narrative momentum. Yet in the culture that absorbed it, the song was treated as if it were the central emotional pillar of the musical.

Something is revealing in that inflation. Teen dramas of the late 90s and early 2000s ran on a steady diet of unrequited longing. The creators didn’t even try to disguise it. Characters spent entire seasons nursing private hopes, quietly suffering in corners, convinced their feelings granted them a kind of moral depth. Being chosen was almost beside the point. What mattered was the ache, how clearly you felt it, how steadily you carried it, how beautifully you endured. That worldview found its perfect avatar in Eponine. She wasn’t designed as a romantic heroine; she was designed as emotional negative space. She stands on the rim of the story and pours her life into someone who barely registers her existence. That dynamic made her accessible to a wide range of audiences, especially young viewers who had absorbed the idea that the nobility of desire was measured not by reciprocity but by intensity.

The culture was primed to elevate her moment because it recognized something of itself in her. Even without knowing the specifics of her life or the political context, people understood the emotional architecture: the quiet devotion, the hope that asks for nothing, the routine of turning loneliness into a private ritual. In an era where emotions were often performed more than experienced, On My Own felt strangely sincere. It didn’t pretend that longing could transform anything. It didn’t imagine that the world would rearrange itself to reflect her wishes. It simply allowed a person to speak the truth they couldn’t bear to say aloud.

The lyrics make that point with almost surgical clarity. The song announces its premise in the first line: “pretending he’s beside me.” Not imagining. Not remembering. Pretending. She is building something out of nothing, and she knows it. Every line that follows reinforces the split between the world she lives in and the world she creates. When she walks with him “till morning,” she isn’t describing a memory; she is describing a fantasy she sustains to survive the hours between dusk and dawn. When she feels his arms around her, she is engaging in a kind of emotional sleight of hand, replacing absence with invented warmth. Even the environment changes under the spell. The city glows only because she projects meaning onto it. The rain, the pavement, they shine because the fantasy allows them to.

What complicates the song, and what makes it more than a simple lament, is her awareness. She admits that she has been pretending. She knows that his life would continue whether she lived or died. She sees the distance between herself and the object of her longing with painful accuracy. And yet she cannot release the image she has built. That tension is the emotional engine of the piece: someone fully conscious of their own self-deception, unwilling to give it up because the lie offers a stability the truth never has.

The final line is often misread as a declaration of love, but it carries the opposite weight. “I love him… but only on my own” acknowledges that the feeling has no external reality. It’s a closed system, sealed off from the world. The love she describes exists only because she sustains it. It requires no response, no validation, no confrontation. In that sense, it is more about control than romance. She chooses a fantasy because the fantasy cannot reject her. She chooses distance because distance cannot disappoint her. She chooses isolation because isolation cannot be taken away.

Outside the musical, this emotional pattern resonated with anyone who had learned, consciously or not, to prioritize longing over fulfillment. Teenagers picked it up because it mirrored how they had been taught to think about desire, as something that defined them, regardless of whether it led anywhere. Queer audiences recognized it as a familiar form of coded survival: the quiet maintenance of a private world when the public one refused to acknowledge it. Young women absorbed it as a culturally sanctioned version of devotion: be patient, be loyal, be invisible, and let the ache stand in for agency. The song’s portability made it powerful. You didn’t need to know who Marius was or why Paris was on the brink of revolt. You only needed to understand what it meant to love someone who never looked back.

Television and film leaned on that portability. A few opening bars could turn any scene into an emotional monologue. The song became the musical equivalent of a close-up: intimate, isolating, revealing. It allowed writers to skip narrative development and dive directly into emotional payoff. And for viewers, especially those who hadn’t yet lived the kinds of relationships the culture told them to expect, the song offered a script for the emotions they did recognize: the crush that never became a conversation, the person who occupied far more space in your mind than you ever occupied in theirs, the silent loyalty that made no demands.

Coming to the musical after all of that cultural residue had accumulated made the original context feel almost surprising. Eponine isn’t the heart of the story. She doesn’t reshape its outcome. She doesn’t command the stage. But in the world outside the theater, she became the emblem of something broader, the instinct to turn longing into identity. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how rarely popular culture encourages people to outgrow that posture. We glamorize yearning in a way that borders on addictive. We treat it as if it reveals something profound about us, when often it reveals only that we have learned how to survive disappointment by decorating it.

What stays with me now is not the song's romantic aspect but the precision with which it captures the emotional mechanics of isolation. It understands how a person can construct an entire reality out of someone who never joined them in it. It understands the comfort of a fantasy that never pushes back. It understands the painful dignity of recognizing the lie while still needing it. And it understands why that state feels safer than anything real: fantasy does not require vulnerability. It doesn’t ask you to risk being seen. It doesn’t force you to acknowledge your own needs. It gives you the illusion of depth without the danger of connection.

Coming late to Les Mis sharpened that understanding. I didn’t inherit the song the way many people did; I stumbled into it already shaped by decades of cultural reinterpretation. That odd sequence, first the teen drama, then the original context, made me see how a small moment inside a massive story could become a defining emotional artifact outside it. On My Own survived because it named something people recognized before they had words for it. It described the architecture of longing with an honesty most stories avoid. And it stayed because nearly everyone has lived at least one stretch of life where the imagined version of someone mattered more than the real one.

The song isn’t about love. It’s about survival. Not the heroic kind, but the quiet, nightly ritual of constructing a companion out of thin air. And if the world embraced it so fiercely, it’s because that ritual is more common than we care to admit.

Les Misérables Cosette artwork. Used under fair use for commentary.

Still from Lea Salonga’s performance of “On My Own” in Les Misérables. Used under fair use for commentary and critical analysis. Copyright remains with the original rights holders.

Still of Katie Holmes performing “On My Own” on Dawson’s Creek. Used under fair use for commentary and critical analysis. Copyright remains with the original rights holders (Sony Pictures Television).