In his brilliant book of essays Working the Room, Geoff Dyer describes falling in love with this woman. But they’ve never met. In fact, he’s never seen or heard of her in any context other than this one photograph. How can that be?
“Well, whoever she is, she’s beautiful. Actually, I can’t really tell if that’s true, for the simple reason that I can’t see enough of her face. But she must be beautiful, for an equally simple reason: because I’m in love with her.”
Eloquently put, but is it possible to fall in love with a figure in a photograph? Well, possibly. We’ve all leafed through a book and found ourselves fleetingly besotted. It's important, too, that we differentiate between falling in love and being in love, the former a state of vertiginous possibility, the latter one of some certainty.
And can’t it feel like we love someone before we ever lay eyes on them? The feeling that we’ve waited for such a person, and when we finally see them they are perfectly familiar. And yet we think of love as an intense attachment to somebody as they are at this very moment. But something of love is constituted by the idea of a person, not simply (or only) the physical being before us. If we can love something not yet there — the possibility of a future, the person we hope they become — then falling in love with someone you’ve only seen or heard isn’t quite as absurd as it sounds.
And can’t it feel like we love someone before we ever lay eyes on them? The feeling that we’ve waited for such a person, and when we finally see them they are perfectly familiar. And yet we think of love as an intense attachment to somebody as they are at this very moment. But something of love is constituted by the idea of a person, not simply (or only) the physical being before us. If we can love something not yet there — the possibility of a future, the person we hope they become — then falling in love with someone you’ve only seen or heard isn’t quite as absurd as it sounds.
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