Dating Someone Who Isn't in the Room
On projection, presence, and the difference between a person and the curation.
You meet someone. There's a perceived connection. And in the days between the first date and the second, something happens that has almost nothing to do with them: you start filling in the blanks.
You replay the good parts. You reread the texts and decide what the timing of the rhythm means. You take three real things you know about them and creatively build out the other ninety-seven. By the time you see them again, you're not nervous to meet them, you're anxiously anticipating confirming it's the person you've already curated.
You've started dating someone who isn't in the room.
The Person You Built
This is projection, and it's one of the most human things we do. The mind reaches for a fantasy and lays it gently over a real human being. We do it hardest when we want something badly and know the actual person least, making early dating the perfect storm. Not much information, a lot of wanting, and a nervous system that would really like this to be the one. So we fill the gaps with hopeful, mostly believable narratives.
Co-Regulation and Curation
Connection isn't built out of idealization. It's built out of co-regulation, when physical nervous systems are in the same space, responding to each other in real time, sensing and adjusting and settling. It's a felt thing, a body thing, a connection as something that happens between, not something you perform.
A curated narrative can't co-regulate with you. That “felt sense” happens in the echo chamber of your psyche, with no real other to attune to. You can feel an enormous amount around a projection, like longing, anticipation, and that electric pull. But it isn't a reliable source of information regarding this potential partnership because there isn’t an autonomous person on the other end to connect with. You're in a relationship with your own idea, and your idea machine can serve as a barrier to trusting genuine organic connection.
Why Do We Do This
It's tempting to call this a mistake, or naivety. It isn't. Like most of what we do in dating, the curation is protection.
The real other is genuinely unknown, unknowable, even, this early and that uncertainty is exposing. The person you've built is safe. They're controllable. They behave. They can't disappoint you the way a separate human with their own interior, their own timing, their own freedom absolutely can. Building someone up is a way to manage the risk of not actually knowing them yet. It's intelligent. It's also expensive, because the more detailed the image, the harder the collision when the real person finally comes through it. And they were there the whole time, you just weren't dating them.
Staying in the Real
The growth journey isn't to stop wanting, or dating, to talk yourself out of liking someone, or even to avoid it altogether. It’s more internal and intentional than that. It's to keep noticing the actual human sharing space with you. The real, specific, slightly inconvenient person who exists whether or not they match your draft.
You can only meet a real person when you're actually there yourself, because projection is also a way of leaving your own seat, busy up in the story, not down in the room. Staying present means allowing them to stay a little unknown, getting curious instead of certain, and letting who they actually are be the experience. How that “felt sense” shows up, that's what you respond to.
