In the age of the profile picture, it has become increasingly difficult to tell whether we are looking at people or at portraits. The distinction matters more than we admit. Much of modern emotional life arises not from encounters with actual human beings but from encounters with their images.
Images glow, circulate, and acquire an independent life. We fall in love with them, compete with them, resent them, or measure ourselves against them. The person beneath the image remains largely undisturbed by this drama, which is precisely the problem: we rarely meet that person at all.
The mind, obligingly, manufactures its own images as well. It sketches flattering versions of ourselves and hangs them in the internal gallery. These portraits are subtle; they are not always the grand fantasies of heroism or genius. Often they are small narratives: the generous friend, the misunderstood partner, the quietly exceptional professional.
Over time, we begin to believe these images are us. In fact, we begin to like them very much. The strange part is that we forget when the portrait was painted. The starting point—the moment before the image existed—vanishes from memory. What remains is a life spent protecting, polishing, and defending something that was never real.
This is one of the reasons why people feel persistently unhappy in an era that promises constant connection and self-expression. We are praised or dismissed not for who we are but for the images we project. Compliments land on the surface and sink no deeper. Criticism, similarly, wounds the image rather than the person. But strangely, both reactions feel personal.
The result is a peculiar psychological vertigo: we are emotionally invested in something we suspect is a construction. Any structure built on such fragile foundations eventually develops cracks. It is no coincidence that relationships formed within this architecture of images often struggle to endure.
A childhood memory vividly illustrates the sensation. Imagine being asked to dance at a family gathering. You comply in the awkward, uncoordinated way that children do, limbs moving with more enthusiasm than rhythm. The adults applaud warmly. Someone declares it “wonderful.” Yet the child senses an odd discomfort. The praise feels misdirected, as if it were meant for someone else. The child knows—without cynicism, without theory—that the performance was not particularly remarkable. And so the applause produces a strange feeling. Something inside whispers: they are praising an illusion.
Adulthood often repeats that scene on a larger stage. We cultivate a professional identity, a public persona, a carefully edited version of ourselves. Recognition follows: approval from colleagues, admiration from acquaintances, and the applause of social media. Yet the old discomfort lingers. Praise lands but does not satisfy, because it attaches itself to the constructed image rather than to the quiet, unadvertised self behind it. The more praise arrives, the more acute the question becomes: why am I being applauded for something that does not feel entirely mine?
In theory, love should rescue us from this theatre of images. In practice, it often becomes its most elaborate production. The language of romance is full of conditions that masquerade as inevitabilities. We say we love someone when they behave reasonably, align with our preferences, and reciprocate our needs. Desire, bodily attraction, intellectual compatibility, and emotional security—each is treated as a pillar supporting the structure called love. Yet one begins to wonder whether love truly requires such architectural reinforcement. Must it always be justified, explained, defended?
The question becomes particularly visible in digital life, where the image is not merely metaphorical but literal. Consider the triumph of the filter. A photograph is captured, softened, brightened, reshaped. Skin is smoothened, eyes are brightened, and imperfections vanish. At first, the alteration feels harmless, almost playful. But the altered face soon becomes the public version of oneself. After enough repetitions, uploading an unfiltered photograph can feel daunting.
The edited version has quietly replaced reality. The image now precedes the person who created it. Filters have replaced self-confidence.
The discomfort that follows is not merely aesthetic. It’s existential. The filter becomes a superimposed identity, a version of the self that is real enough to be believed but artificial enough to feel estranged. One begins to live in relation to that image, measuring oneself against it, defending it, fearing its collapse. The trap is subtle because it begins with something small—one altered photo, one curated post—and expands into a persistent sense of distance from oneself.
Philosophers have long argued about the origin of love. Some claim it grows from experience: we encounter another person, share moments, accumulate memories, and affection slowly crystallises. Others suggest desire ignites the process, the body leading where the mind later follows. Yet these explanations may overlook a crucial detail. Experience itself does not transform into love. The experiencer does. Something in the perceiving mind rearranges itself until affection appears inevitable.
The problem, of course, is that the perceiving mind is already crowded with images. We do not encounter people as blank presences. We meet them through the lens of preferences, expectations, memories, and cultural narratives. We notice their likes and dislikes, tally their virtues and irritations, and quietly perform an evaluation. If enough boxes are checked, the mind declares the result love. But what it has actually produced is an agreement between images: the image we hold of ourselves and the image we have assembled of the other person.
Modern dating culture, with its ever-expanding vocabulary—ghosting, breadcrumbing, benching—reflects this fragmentation. Relationships are sliced into behavioural categories, just as consumer products are sorted into market segments. Each new term identifies a particular failure of attention or sincerity.
The proliferation of labels also reveals something deeper: we are attempting to manage intimacy with the logic of transactions. The mind that fragments experience into categories then tries to assemble those fragments into something resembling love.
Genuine affection cannot survive such accounting. If love is the outcome of constant evaluation—this trait is good, that habit is annoying, this belief is compatible, that is ambition troubling—then what emerges is less a relationship than a negotiated settlement. Two personalities adjust to each other, like diplomats cautiously drafting a treaty.
There are, however, moments when evaluation stops. Anyone who has stood before a wild landscape or encountered a piece of music that suspends thought will recognise the sensation. The mind, usually busy comparing and interpreting, falls silent. Something similar can occur between people. For an instant, there is no calculation, no quiet measurement of advantages or risks. The other person is simply present, and one’s own presence feels inseparable from theirs.
If that sounds mystical, it is because we have grown accustomed to thinking of love as a problem to solve rather than a perception to experience. When the evaluating mind retreats, the distance between observer and observed shrinks. The flower is no longer merely an object whose colour we prefer or whose scent reminds us of childhood; it is simply there, vivid and complete. Likewise, the person before us is no longer an arrangement of qualities to be assessed but a presence that interrupts our internal commentary.
The difficulty is that the mind rarely tolerates such silence for long. Its nature is restless. It prefers two contradictory things at once: intimacy and control. To feel close to someone is exhilarating; to surrender the evaluating mind is unsettling. The result is a cycle familiar to anyone who has loved: closeness followed by analysis, spontaneity followed by doubt, presence followed by interpretation. The mind reenters the scene and begins rearranging the images.
Perhaps love resembles climbing a mountain more than constructing a building. The climber moves step by step, the air thinning, the view widening upward. On the ascent, certain things fall away—excess weight, unnecessary equipment, distracting noise. Two climbers ascending together discover that conversation becomes simpler, even sparse. The climb occupies attention. At the summit, the distance between them feels smaller than it did at the base.
Love, approached this way, does not require elaborate reasoning. It does not depend on the careful maintenance of images. Instead, it emerges when the distance created by those images dissolves, even briefly. Paradoxically, such moments cannot be manufactured by effort. The mind that tries to produce love through strategy usually produces something else: desire, possession, negotiation.
It leaves us with an uncomfortable but hopeful conclusion. The problem may not be that love is rare but that the mind keeps interrupting it with portraits—of ourselves, of others, of the lives we believe we should be living. Remove the portraits, even for a moment, and something authentic appears. It has no filter, no applause, no carefully curated identity. Yet it feels unmistakably real. And perhaps that, in a world of images, is the closest thing we have to love.
-30-
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to [email protected]
