The Projection We Call Love

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It is our own concept—our own selves—that we love.

That's Fernando Pessoa. It sits there, quiet and sharp. You think you love them. You love who you decided they are.

The feeling is real. The warmth when they walk in. The ache when they're gone. The sense of knowing, of being known. None of that is fake.

But Pessoa asks a harder question: what is the object of that feeling? Is it the person in front of you—the actual, irreducibly other human being with their own interior you can never fully access? Or is it the portrait you've painted of them, the composite of your projections and preferences, the version that fits your story?

Most of the time, honestly, it's the portrait.

This isn't cynicism. It's just how perception works. We don't have unmediated access to anyone. Every relationship runs through interpretation. You see their actions, hear their words, and your mind fills in the rest—motives, meanings, the whole invisible architecture of who they are.

The filling-in isn't optional. We don't get to opt out. The question is whether you know you're doing it.

Here's where it gets uncomfortable: the love often feels strongest when the projection is tightest. Early romance is intoxicating because you don't know them yet. The gaps in your knowledge get filled with hope, fantasy, the best possible interpretation. You're not seeing them. You're seeing potential. You're seeing what you need them to be.

And then, slowly or suddenly, reality contradicts the image.

They do something that doesn't fit. They reveal a depth or a flaw or a preference that wasn't in your portrait. The projection cracks. And this is the moment that matters—this is where love either deepens or dies.

The instinct is to defend the image. Explain away the contradiction. "That's not really them." "They're just stressed." "They'll change." We work hard to preserve the portrait because we've fallen in love with it. Letting it break feels like losing them, even though the portrait was never them to begin with.

But the portrait breaking is how you get closer to the actual person.

Real love—the rare kind, the demanding kind—might be the willingness to let the image shatter and stay anyway. Not because you've perfected your perception. Because you've accepted that your perception will always be incomplete, and you're committed to the ongoing revision.

This is what it means to seek resonance with the actual person rather than coherence with your own construction. You hold your understanding of them loosely. You stay curious about who they're becoming, who they've always been that you haven't seen yet. You let them surprise you. You let them be stranger than your story about them.

The dissonance in long relationships—that friction that seems to come from nowhere—is often projection colliding with reality. The work isn't labor, isn't fixing. It's the ongoing practice of seeing. Every time you catch yourself reacting to the projection instead of the person, you have a choice: defend the image or update it.

Defending feels like loyalty. Updating feels like betrayal. But updating is the only way to love what's actually there.

Pessoa's provocation isn't that love is impossible. It's that easy love—the love that never questions its own perception—is probably loving an image. The harder path is admitting you don't know them as well as you think. That the intimacy you feel might be intimacy with your own construction. That the person beside you remains, in some essential way, unknown.

That's not a failure of the relationship. That's the condition of all relationships. The question is what you do with it.

You could despair—if I can never truly know them, why bother? But that misses the point. The bother is the love. The ongoing attempt to see past your own projections, to stay curious about who they actually are, to let them be real instead of convenient—that effortful seeing is what love looks like when it matures.

Not "I finally know you." But "I'm still trying to see you, and I won't stop."

You don't love them. You love who you decided they are. But you could learn to love who they actually are—if you're willing to keep revising the portrait every time it cracks.