In the tenth grade, I bought a ring for a girl I liked. Not a metaphorical ring. An actual ring, from an actual store, with actual money I’d saved from doing nothing particularly useful — which, at sixteen, is the only kind of money available. The plan was not entirely my own: a female friend helped me pick it out, because I assumed — with the confidence of someone who has never tested his assumptions — that a girl would know what another girl wants. Two teenagers considered this plan reasonable. This is either a testament to the power of adolescent conviction or a failure of peer review. Possibly both. Neither of us was calibrated for this, but we were certain, which is the adolescent substitute for competence.
In my defense — and this is the kind of defense that makes things worse, not better — I had precedent. In the fifth grade, a girl who liked me gave me a bracelet in the shape of half a heart. She kept the other half. I was eleven. I accepted the bracelet. The world did not end. So when I, five years later, decided to give a ring, I operated under the reasonable assumption that jewelry was an established communication protocol between teenagers. What I failed to account for was that a half-heart bracelet from a girl in fifth grade and a ring from a boy in tenth grade are not the same message, and the difference is approximately the distance between “I think you’re cute” and “I have planned our future.” I did not see this distance. She did. Immediately.
This was not my first crush. She and I had been friends for years. But I’d reached the phase where a sixteen-year-old boy decides he’s ready to express his feelings like an adult, which in practice means doing something an adult wouldn’t do but with the conviction that it’s extremely mature. I wasn’t proposing anything. For me, the ring was a gesture — a way of saying something I couldn’t say with words, scaled up from the bracelet precedent with the logic of someone who thinks romantic communication has a linear progression. For her, it was almost certainly something entirely different, involving a level of commitment she had not been consulted about.
The original plan involved a bouquet of flowers delivered at school with the practiced casualness of someone who had rehearsed his casual expression in the mirror. But on February 14th, a snowstorm cancelled classes — because the universe, as I’ve noted elsewhere, has a documented sense of timing. By evening, we’d arranged to go ice skating in town. I decided to give her the ring before we got to the rink — the kind of setting a sixteen-year-old considers romantic and an adult considers a place where emotional intensity has no emergency exit.
Her reaction was not what the screenplay called for. She said her grandmother might see us, which was her way of saying “this is too much, too fast, and I am sixteen and not equipped for whatever this is.” The grandmother was a diplomatic fiction. The real message was: you have arrived at a level of intensity I did not agree to, and I would like to leave this scene now. She was right to be alarmed. I was starring in, directing, and producing a film without her consent, and the audience — her grandmother, apparently — had not purchased tickets.
So I went ice skating with a ring in my pocket, hoping I wouldn’t fall on it and break it — which, in retrospect, is a perfect metaphor for the next sixteen years of my romantic life: carrying something fragile that nobody asked for, trying not to damage it, and not quite understanding why no one wanted to hold it.
I was not expressing love. I was running a film inside my head and casting someone in it without an audition. This is, I have since learned, not a thing you grow out of automatically. It took me another sixteen years, several confused women, and one relationship that taught me the difference between projection and presence, to begin understanding what I was actually doing. I am not entirely sure I’m done learning. But I no longer lead with jewelry, and my peer review process has improved considerably.
Through the lens of optics
Projection, before it became a psychological term, was an optical one. A cinema projector takes a small, translucent image and casts it, enlarged and vivid, onto a flat screen. The audience experiences depth, movement, emotion — sometimes enough to cry, which is remarkable given that they are staring at light hitting a wall. But the screen is blank. The story is manufactured by the source. The depth is an illusion created by light, shadow, and the audience’s willingness to forget that what they’re seeing was never really there.
The mechanism is worth noting because it’s precise: projection requires a source, a medium, and a surface. The source is internal — it’s the film, the narrative, the story you’re telling. The surface is external — it’s the person, the situation, the world. And what appears on the surface tells you more about the source than about the wall. The wall didn’t do anything. The wall was just there, being a wall, while you projected an entire cinematic universe onto it and then got upset when it didn’t match.
Every significant relationship I’ve entered began as a private screening. I projected, the other person reflected, and I fell for the image. When the lights came on — which they always do, usually around month three, when someone fails to respond to a message with the exact emotional cadence I’d scripted for them — I was confused to find that the person sitting next to me didn’t look like the movie. Not because she had changed. Because she had never been the movie. She had been a person, sitting in the room, wondering why I kept looking at the screen instead of at her.
Through the lens of computer vision
In my field, projection is the foundational mathematical operation: the transformation of a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional image. This is not optional. A camera must project — it compresses volumetric reality into a flat representation. Information is irreversibly lost. Depth vanishes. Surfaces occlude each other. Two objects at different distances can appear identical. The image is not the world. It is a lossy compression of the world, shaped by the camera’s position, focal length, and intrinsic parameters. Change the angle, and different things become visible. Same scene, different projection, different image. Both real. Both incomplete.
I’ve spent years building systems that reconstruct three-dimensional structure from two-dimensional projections — stereo vision, structure from motion, depth estimation. The mathematics is unambiguous: you need multiple views to recover what a single view loses. One projection is inherently ambiguous. Two begin to constrain the solution. More is better. This is not a philosophical opinion. It is linear algebra.
The analogy to relationships is precise enough to be personally insulting. You cannot know a person from a single angle — from the first date, from the curated version they present when they’re still performing, from the projection your brain generates in the first seventy-two hours. You need time, contexts, disagreements, mornings when neither of you is performing, moments of genuine ugliness. These are additional views. They are not noise interfering with the beautiful initial render. They are the depth information without which you’re staring at a flat picture and calling it a person.
I historically prefer the initial high-resolution render. Collecting additional views requires patience, vulnerability, and the willingness to discover that the three-dimensional reconstruction doesn’t look like the pretty 2D projection you started with. It never does. That’s not a bug in the person. It’s the fundamental geometry of actually knowing someone, and it cannot be hacked, optimized, or compressed without losing the thing you claim to be looking for.
Through the lens of neuroscience
In 2018, Carolyn Parkinson, Adam Kleinbaum, and Thalia Wheatley published a study in Nature Communications that made the physics of connection uncomfortably literal. They used fMRI to scan 42 people within a real-world social network of 279 graduate students while they watched the same video clips. Neural response similarity predicted friendship status with remarkable accuracy, even after controlling for demographics. Friends literally processed the world in more similar ways — not in one brain region, but across the cortex.
This is neural homophily: the people you connect with are the people whose brains respond to the same stimuli in similar patterns. The “clicking” that feels mystical is measurable. It is a real neurophysiological phenomenon, not a romantic abstraction. Which means the failure to click might also be neurophysiological — not a matter of insufficient effort or bad timing, but a genuine mismatch in how two brains encode the world.
Dorothy Tennov, an American psychologist who interviewed over five hundred people about love, coined the term limerence in her 1979 book Love and Limerence to describe a state she found was involuntary, obsessive, and strikingly consistent across demographics. The limerent person doesn’t see the other person. They construct an idealized image — assembled from fragments of real data and vast quantities of self-generated narrative — and then fall for the construction. The critical feature of limerence is its intrusiveness: it invades consciousness against your will. It is not a choice. It is not a character flaw. It is a neurochemical event masquerading as the deepest feeling you’ve ever had.
Here is where projection and resonance collide: limerence feels like resonance. It feels like “clicking.” It produces the subjective certainty that this person understands you at a frequency nobody else can reach. But limerence is not resonance. Limerence is a projector running at full brightness. The signal you think you’re receiving from the other person is the signal you’re generating yourself, reflected back off a surface you haven’t examined closely because the image is too beautiful to question. Real resonance — the neural synchrony that Parkinson measured — requires multiple exposures, shared experience over time, the kind of slow calibration that limerence specifically prevents because limerence is in a hurry.
I have been limerent. I have gone on three dates with someone and constructed an entire relationship arc in my head — complete with dialogue she never said and compatibility she never demonstrated — and then experienced genuine grief when reality failed to match the screenplay. I have been told I was emotionally unavailable by someone who was right in ways I couldn’t hear at the time — because I was available, just not to her. I was available to the version of her I’d built in my head. When that version dissolved, I stood there like an engineer whose model just failed on test data, confused and slightly offended at reality for not cooperating.
Through the lens of evolutionary biology
Here is a fact that would have saved me enormous confusion in my twenties: sexual attraction and long-term compatibility are optimized by evolution for different things. Attraction is calibrated for genetic fitness — symmetry, health signals, immunocompatibility, reproductive viability. Compatibility is calibrated for cohabitation — shared values, conflict resolution, emotional regulation, and communication patterns. These two functions overlap only partially. You can want someone with every cell in your body and be unable to hold a useful conversation with them. You can feel utterly safe with someone and wonder why the chemistry isn’t there.
The mismatch is not a personal failing. It is two ancient optimization functions running on the same hardware and producing contradictory outputs. The ancestral environment that shaped these systems didn’t require you to cohabitate for fifty years, co-parent while managing dual careers, and negotiate whose family to visit at Christmas. It required you to reproduce. The system works. The requirements have changed. Nobody issued a patch — which, if you’ve read the article on Fragility, is a phrase I use more often than I’d like.
I’ve experienced both flavors. The volcanic ones, where the attraction was so loud that it drowned out every signal that the communication was broken. And the comfortable ones where everything worked except the thing that makes you want to stay in bed on a Sunday morning. I walked away from the second type more than once, looking for more fire. What I didn’t understand then was that I was optimizing for the projection — the vivid, cinematic, high-contrast version of love. The signal — the boring, daily, undramatic capacity to be in the same room without performing — was exactly what I was filtering out. I was a computer vision engineer who couldn’t distinguish signal from noise in his own life, which is the kind of professional irony that doesn’t fit on a business card but probably should.
Through the lens of relationship science
John Gottman, at the University of Washington, studied over forty thousand couples across four decades and produced a finding that should be printed on the packaging of every romantic comedy: he can predict divorce with roughly 94% accuracy by observing a couple’s interaction patterns for minutes. The predictors are not passion, chemistry, or shared interests. They are communication patterns — specifically, four behaviors he calls the Four Horsemen: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Contempt alone — the expression of disgust toward your partner — is the single strongest predictor of relationship failure.
His research also revealed a number that I find simultaneously depressing and liberating: 69% of relationship conflicts are perpetual. They never resolve. Not because the couples failed. Because the conflicts arise from fundamental personality differences that don’t change. The couples that last are not the ones who fix everything. They are the ones who learn to live inside the unfixable without contempt. Which is a fundamentally different project from finding the person with whom everything is fixable — because that person doesn’t exist, and looking for them is just another form of projection.
This reframes the entire romantic project in a way I wish I’d understood earlier and probably wouldn’t have believed if someone had told me. The question is not “who is my person?” — as if somewhere there exists a projection that matches reality pixel for pixel. The question is: with whom can I have the conversation that never ends, about problems that never fully resolve, without losing respect for them or for myself?
Through the lens of philosophy
Martin Buber, in I and Thou (1923), drew a distinction I find increasingly impossible to ignore. He proposed two fundamental modes of relating: I-It, in which the other is an object to be experienced, analyzed, and used; and I-Thou, in which the other is encountered as a full, irreducible subject — not a category, not a function, not a data point in your optimization model, but a presence.
The I-Thou encounter, Buber argued, cannot be manufactured. It cannot be planned, scheduled, or produced through sufficient research. It happens — or it doesn’t — in the space between two people who are genuinely present. The moment you analyze it, you’ve exited it. The moment you try to produce it, you’ve already shifted to I-It. It exists only in real time, between real subjects, without the mediating layer of evaluation that my brain considers essential to all operations.
I recognize, with appropriate discomfort, that I live almost entirely in I-It mode. I evaluate people. I assess compatibility. I calculate the probability that a connection will be worth the investment. I do this not because I’m cold — people who know me would not describe me as cold — but because I’m afraid. Afraid of the thing Buber says is the precondition for I-Thou: vulnerability without a safety net. Encountering someone without having pre-analyzed whether the encounter will be worthwhile. Showing up without a projection ready. Standing in front of a blank screen and seeing what actually appears instead of what I planned to show.
The hardest thing I’ve learned — and I genuinely don’t know if I’ve fully learned it — is that love is not the projection. Love is what’s left when the projection fades, and you choose to stay anyway.
Connections
Projection connects to Overfitting — because falling for a projection is overfitting to a tiny, curated dataset: three conversations, a first impression, a feeling that your brain generated and attributed to the other person. It connects to Noise vs. Signal — because a projection is noise your brain produces and mistakes for signal from outside. It connects to Fragility — because a relationship built on a projection is structurally fragile: optimized for the idealized version and helpless against the real one. It connects to Entropy — because connection, like all ordered states, requires continuous energy to maintain, and the moment you stop investing in the real person and start coasting on the projection, the relationship begins its drift toward maximum disorder. And it connects to Resonance — a concept I explored separately and folded into this piece — because the thing I’ve been calling “resonance” might be exactly what genuine connection feels like once you stop projecting and start perceiving.
What I Don’t Know
I haven’t explored attachment theory — John Bowlby’s foundational work on how early relational patterns create the projector itself, determining whether you project safety or danger onto the same person, which would make projection not a choice but an inheritance. I haven’t examined what dating apps do to this problem — whether swiping through compressed 2D representations of people is the ultimate projection machine or so absurdly reductive that it might accidentally teach you to look past surfaces, which would be ironic enough to deserve its own article. I haven’t looked at the anthropology of courtship rituals — how different cultures structure the transition from projection to reality through ceremonies, families, and time — and whether the modern erosion of these structures has left analytically-minded people like me without scaffolding that once made connection easier to initiate. And I haven’t considered what it’s like to be the screen — to sense that someone loves a version of you that isn’t quite you, and to not know whether correcting them means losing what you have.
Where I Stand
I spent years looking for someone who matched a model I’d built. The model was detailed, internally consistent, and wrong — not because the qualities were bad, but because I was shopping for a projection instead of showing up for a person. I was running a private cinema and auditioning everyone for a role they didn’t know existed.
I’ve stopped doing that — or more accurately, I’ve started catching myself doing it, which is not the same thing but is considerably better than not noticing. The shift happened not through a single insight but through accumulated evidence: the ring that panicked a girl in eighth grade, the relationships where I was available to the version and absent from the person, the moments — honestly counted, at least three — where the right person was probably standing in front of me and I was too busy comparing her to the model to notice.
What I’ve learned, through enough repetitions that even my analytical mind has accepted the data, is that the difference between a projection and a relationship is that a projection confirms you and a relationship changes you. I have historically preferred confirmation. I am trying, with mixed results and frequent relapses into familiar pattern-matching, to prefer change. Not because change sounds noble in an article, but because confirmation has not, empirically, worked — and at some point even an overfitter has to look at the validation set and acknowledge that the training loss was never the metric that mattered.
The woman I described wanting — playful, smart, ironic, warm, full of life — might be less a description of a partner and more a description of who I want to become. And if that’s true, then what I’m looking for isn’t someone who brings those things into my life. It’s someone in whose presence I become them. Which is a different search entirely. Less cinematic. More terrifying. Probably more honest.
I’m still looking. But with fewer auditions and more attention to whoever is actually in the room. That’s not a resolution. It’s a direction. And for someone who has historically preferred the clarity of a projection to the ambiguity of a person, a direction is more than enough to work with.
Written: April 2026 Version: 1.0 This is how I understand this concept today. It will change.
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