The Perfect Image

You are not in love with a person. You are in love with an idea.

This is true more often than we want to admit. We meet someone, and almost immediately, we begin projecting onto them—our fantasies, our needs, our vision of who they should be. We fall in love with this projection, then wonder why the real person keeps disappointing us.

The person behind the projection is rarely consulted. They exist, going about their actual life with their actual flaws and complications. But we don't see them. We see only the image we've created—and we love that image with desperate sincerity.

No novel explores this illusion more precisely than The Great Gatsby.

Jay Gatsby spends years building a fortune, throwing elaborate parties, positioning himself across the bay from Daisy Buchanan—all for one purpose: to win back the woman he loved five years earlier.

But here's what Fitzgerald shows us: Gatsby doesn't actually love Daisy. He loves who Daisy was to him in 1917—or rather, who he imagined her to be. The real Daisy, with her "voice full of money" and her careless cruelty, is quite different from the golden girl of his memory.

The colossal vitality of his illusion. No real person could match what Gatsby had constructed. The illusion was too complete, too perfect, too long-nurtured. Daisy's actual presence could only disappoint.

This is the danger of the perfect image: no person can sustain it. The very act of being real—with moods, flaws, changes—violates the perfection we've imagined.

In Great Expectations, Pip falls for Estella the moment he meets her—and spends most of the novel pursuing an illusion.

Estella is beautiful, cold, and explicitly warned by Miss Havisham to break hearts. She tells Pip directly that she has no heart to give, that she is incapable of love. And yet Pip persists, convinced that his devotion will somehow transform her.

Against reason, against promise, against hope. Pip knows his love is irrational. He knows Estella has warned him. He knows there is no hope. And yet he loves—or thinks he loves—anyway.

What Pip actually loves is the idea of Estella—the beautiful, unattainable star. His love is bound up with his class aspirations, his desire to become a gentleman, his rejection of his humble origins. Estella represents everything he wants to be. Loving her is loving his own fantasy of transformation.

Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse doesn't project onto a lover—she projects onto everyone.

She decides that Harriet Smith must love Mr. Elton. She decides that Frank Churchill is interested in Jane Fairfax. She constructs elaborate romances in her mind, assigns roles to the people around her, and then is shocked when reality refuses to cooperate.

Austen shows us, with characteristic precision, how projection works. Emma sees what she wants to see. She interprets evidence to fit her theories. She ignores anything that contradicts her constructions.

Emma is not malicious. She genuinely wants to help. But her help is filtered through her own projections. She knows what others should want before asking what they actually want. Her compassion, genuine as it is, is corrupted by her certainty that she understands others better than they understand themselves.

Her awakening comes when Mr. Knightley forces her to see what she's done—how her projections have hurt Harriet, embarrassed herself, and blinded her to her own heart.

Why do we project? What makes us fall in love with images rather than people?

We fill in the gaps. We never know another person completely. The gaps in our knowledge get filled by imagination—and imagination tends to be flattering. We assume the best about the unknown qualities, projecting our hopes onto the blank spaces.

We see what we need. The projection often reveals more about us than about the beloved. Gatsby needs Daisy to represent his success. Pip needs Estella to represent his transformation. We project our needs onto others, then "love" them for meeting needs they never knew about.

We resist updating. Even when evidence contradicts our projection, we resist seeing it. We interpret behavior to fit our image. We make excuses. We maintain the illusion because the truth would require us to grieve the fantasy.

"People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for."

— Harper Lee

We see what we look for. In love, we look for confirmation of our projections. We filter everything through what we've already decided to believe. The real person could be standing right in front of us, trying to tell us who they actually are, and we wouldn't hear them.

How do you move from loving an image to loving a person?

Expect disappointment. Not cynically—realistically. Real people will always disappoint the perfect image. This is not their failure; it's the nature of reality. If you're never disappointed, you're probably still projecting.

Listen more than imagine. What does this person actually say about themselves? What do their actions reveal? Take information from reality rather than supplying it from fantasy.

Notice the gaps. Where are you filling in blanks with hope? What do you not actually know about this person? Acknowledge the gaps rather than papering over them with imagination.

Ask what you're projecting. What do you need from this person? What role do they play in your story? Seeing your own needs clearly helps you separate them from the actual person before you.

"We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are."

— Anaïs Nin

We see things as we are. The work of loving truly is learning to see things—and people—as they are. This requires knowing ourselves well enough to recognize when we're projecting, and humble enough to let the projection go.

The fever dream mistakes intensity for depth. The perfect image mistakes projection for perception. Both are illusions—ways of avoiding the harder work of loving a real person as they really are.

But there's a deeper illusion still. Sometimes we believe that love will fix us—that finding the right person will heal our wounds, complete our deficiencies, transform our lives. This is the rescue fantasy, and it may be the most dangerous illusion of all.

In the next chapter, we'll explore what happens when we expect love to save us—and why the classics warn, again and again, that this expectation leads to ruin.