The New Forbidden Love: Falling for Someone Without a Personal Brand
Tuesday, June 24, 2025 This is for Dr. John Gottman, who, I suspect would agree.
No aesthetic. No Spotify niche. Just presence. And it scares the hell out of you.
Modern dating is often performance art.
We meet each other not as people, but as pitch decks—digitally optimized, emotionally suggestive, and always ready for a soft launch.
Personality is stylized. Pain is formatted. Even intimacy has a visual language now, complete with filters and flashbacks.
Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) feels oddly quaint by comparison.
His impression-management theory once described party etiquette circa 1959; but in 2025 it describes daily survival. The self is always on. There is no backstage—only multiple stages, each hungry for content.
He assumed we took off the mask in private.
These days, the mask has become a second skin. There is no backstage. You’re either performing or you’ve disappeared.
The cultural logic is clear: in order to be loved, you must first be recognizable.
That means clean lines, catchy references, and an aesthetic that tells the other person what kind of love story you’re selling.
Perel’s Illusion: Mystery as Eroticism
Esther Perel, cultural oracle of modern desire, has long championed the idea that eroticism thrives on distance and ambiguity. In The State of Affairs (2017), she writes:
“Desire needs mystery, imagination, and a bit of the forbidden.”
Perel’s voice has become scripture for a generation raised on oversharing and emotional hunger.
But her solution—injecting mystery back into the hyper-familiar—has arguably fed the very culture it claims to soothe us from.
She promotes curated eroticism: the tease, the performance, the almost-but-not-yet.
What began as a thoughtful corrective to dead-bed malaise has been rebranded as yet another aesthetic to maintain.
Her model presumes that distance breeds desire.
But too often in practice, that “distance” becomes withholding.
It privileges ambiguity over attunement.
It creates lovers who are compelling projections rather than emotionally available people.
In a culture already exhausted by identity-performance fatigue, is more mystery what we truly need?
Or is it a way of avoiding the intimacy that presence demands?
Perel’s brilliance lies in reminding long-term couples that eroticism can’t survive total fusion.
Her blind spot is context drift: once “distance” is exported into swipe culture, it tends to reinforce avoidance.
New research suggests that, for emerging relationships, openness—not enigma—best predicts long-term erotic vitality because safety enables exploratory desire. Mystery may titillate, but responsiveness is what sustains.
In a landscape already saturated with half-truths and soft-ghosts, prescribing more curated ambiguity looks less like therapy and more like branding advice.
The Anxiety of the Uncurated
Enter the unbranded person.
No performance. No mystique. No romantic “vibe” to decode.
Just… someone. Breathing. Listening. Responding.
For a generation trained to fall in love with personas, this is not comfort—it’s confrontation. Without a visual or emotional aesthetic to play off, we’re left to face the rawness of relational presence.
This presence demands something we’ve been subtly trained to avoid: mutual subjectivity.
Not mystery. Not eroticized absence. Just the slow burn of being known—without being performed.
Attachment scholars Mikulincer & Shaver (2016) show that secure bonds function as nervous-system co-regulators.
Far from requiring manufactured distance, lasting desire thrives on emotional availability—partners who respond contingently and consistently.
Meta-analyses confirm that perceived responsiveness explains more variance in relationship quality than sexual novelty or blather about “mystery.”
Why Presence Feels Illegible—And Risky
Loving someone without a personal brand feels threatening for at least three reasons:
You Lose Control. You can’t reduce them to archetype or meme. They don’t “fit” into your idea of who you’re supposed to love.
You Can’t Project. Without curated signals, you’re forced to relate to who they are, not who you want them to be.
You Have to Show Up, Too. If they’re not performing, you can’t either. That’s the scariest part.
The “unbranded” person reflects back your own performance. And if you’ve grown comfortable being a well-designed identity, presence can feel unmoored, even uncanny.
Dating Without Performing: An Untrendy Practice
Here’s the opposite of mystery:
You tell the truth. You slow down.
You resist the pressure to narrate your identity like it’s your LinkedIn bio on ayahuasca.
And it’s weird.
It doesn’t scan. It doesn't trend. But it works.
Relational Presence—what attachment researchers call perceived partner responsiveness—predicts stronger long-term well-being than sexual novelty or mystery ever could (Reis et al., 2017).
Rather than chasing erotic tension, presence builds trust. It lets you co-regulate. This is the part that Esther short-shrifts.
It lets your nervous system settle instead of spike. And ironically, it builds the safety from which true erotic risk can emerge—not the curated drama of infidelity, but the radical act of showing up fully clothed in your own interior life.
The Erotic Lie of the Curated Self
Perel’s fixation on eroticism through distance might appeal to long-term monogamous couples already drowning in fusion.
But when transplanted into early-stage dating, it becomes a robust strategic opacity—the refusal to be known, dressed up as self-respect.
It’s aesthetic withholding masquerading as psychological insight.
And it produces exactly what the dating world now is heavily populated with; gorgeous, mysterious people who don’t know how to stay.
What we need isn’t more mystery. It’s more humanity.
Practicing the Forbidden: Attention Without Performance
Here’s what it looks like to reject Perel’s mystique model and try something riskier: being present before being desirable.
You ask questions you don’t already know how to brand.
You offer slow disclosures rather than seductive fragments.
You risk being forgettable in the algorithm in order to be unforgettable in a room.
This is not sexy in the short term.
It will not drive clicks. It will not make people want to chase you.
But it will make it possible for someone to truly see you.
Toward a New Intimacy
We’ve spent a ridiculous decade eroticizing absence.
We’ve made desire into a performance of curated unavailability.
And we’re lonelier than ever.
I fear Esther taught us to fear familiarity.
But perhaps the real problem is that we’ve never really been familiar to each other. We’ve only been branded.
The new forbidden love is not mystery. It’s clarity.
It’s someone showing up without packaging. It’s the terrifying relief of being unhidden—and choosing someone who is, too.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.
Perel, E. (2017). The state of affairs: Rethinking infidelity. Harper.
Reis, H. T., Clark, M. S., & Holmes, J. G. (2017). Perceived partner responsiveness as an organizing construct in the study of intimacy and closeness. Handbook of Personal Relationships (4th ed.), 467–499.
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books.
Alter, A. (2017). Irresistible: The rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked. Penguin Press.