Mythological love fails more often than it succeeds: Orpheus loses Eurydice to one backward glance, Narcissus drowns in his own reflection, Semele burns for demanding to see Zeus as he truly is. These stories show desire triggering metamorphosis, abduction or death, and track what Ovid above all changes from one version to the next. The theme opens with Orpheus and Eurydice, the limit case in which love wins an exemption from the laws of the underworld and then loses it to a single glance. Abductions such as the seizing of Persephone sit under origin, because they account for the order of the world; loves that end in transformation, like Narcissus, belong to metamorphosis. What the theme collects, then, are the stories in which the bond itself is the subject: what it is worth, what it costs and what it is allowed to overturn.