the distinction between being in love with the idea of someone vs being actually in love with them
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Movie ELI5: 500 days of summer
Tom isn’t actually in love with Summer. Tom is in love with the idea of Summer.
Being in love with the idea of someone is when you’re infatuated with a fantasy of who they are. Being actually in love is accepting them, flaws and all, and wanting their happiness above all else. It’s about connection, not just admiration.
Imagine dating a celebrity. You imagine fancy parties, red carpets, private planes, and a jet-set lifestyle with fans who adore the celeberity and adore/envy you for dating them.
Then you date a celebrity and it turns out they’re status-obsessed and shallow; or stupid and boring; or workaholic and emotionally distant.
That’s when you realize you weren’t in love with the actual person; you were in love with what you imagined such a person is. You were in love with your image – your idea – of them, not them.
It is a spectrum.
On one extreme is the person who only sees what they want to see and believe in someone else and “falling in love” with that ideal. So they’re in love with their idea of the person that is very divorced from reality.
More philosophically though this is unavoidable. We as human beings can only interact with the world through our perception. And we perceive through our sensory organs and this MUST be processed by our brains. So we can never really truly say we know “reality” – all our “reality” is created/processed by our biology and our brains.
Bottom line we can be better or more observant and more critical and get closer to understanding the reality of someone else but there is essentially no such thing as perfectly being in love with “someone”. That “someone” is always biased by our processing.
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