Basic Trope: A character is in love with the idea of someone rather than the actual person.
- Straight: Bob is in love with Alice, his Class Representative, who seems to tick all the boxes of his ideal girl, but has never even talked to her to know what she's actually like.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob has never even met Alice, but fell in love with her after he heard some of her friends mention her beauty and virtue once.
- Alice and Bob have a volatile relationship consisting of the two trying to force another to fit their ideal image of a lover.
- Downplayed: While he does project some wishful desires onto her, Bob's feelings for Alice are mostly genuine.
- Justified: Bob had grown up love starved. Alice was one of, if not the first person to show him kindness, and thus he doesn't realize that his projections are clouding him to the real person.
- Inverted: Bob hears his classmates complain about Alice, and immediately dislikes her despite never actually talking to her.
- Subverted: Bob finds the courage to get to know Alice, and appreciates her all the more for her unique quirks.
- Double Subverted: Carol comes into Bob's life, and Bob starts seeing her as a better version of Alice, even though this is only because he's gotten tired of Alice, and is projecting his former ideals onto someone else.
- Parodied: Alice isn't even a real person. She is Bob's imaginary Childhood Friend whom he now perceives as the perfect girlfriend material.
- Zig Zagged: Bob falls in love with Alice, who seems to be exactly his type, but gets disappointed when she has a lot of habits that turn him off. He turns to Carol, who is very similar to Alice, but when her Hidden Depths starts to surface, Bob discovers that he doesn't mind Carol's quirks, and falls in love with her for real.
- Averted: Bob doesn't hold any illusions about Alice and loves her for exactly who she is, Warts and All.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded: "You don't really love Alice, Bob. You just think you love her because of what she symbolizes to you."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Alice immediately tells Bob that she's not some fantasy figure he can project his desires onto and that if he really does love her, then he should accept the reality of who she is.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- Because Bob's feelings for Alice are directed more at what he wishes she were like, he sets himself up for disappointment when he finds out she's nothing like those expectations. Likewise, Alice isn't very flattered that Bob never liked her for who she truly was and calls him out on projecting his selfish desires onto her.
- Bob realized that his feelings for Alice were born out of symbolism and falls in love again...to an incredibly flawed, completely unsuitable woman. Bob has basically stopped idealizing his crushes and instead starts loving them because of their flaws, not in spite of them.
- Reconstructed: Alice has an ideal self that she wants to embody some day, and it's that ideal self she's trying to become, and by extension the pursuit of that self, that Bob has fallen in love with.
- Played For Drama: Bob's entire character development revolves around him learning to love Alice for who she is, not for who he wishes she could be.
- Played For Horror: Bob manages to get into a relationship with Alice, but because she isn't the person he wants her to be, things take an abusive turn. Bob tries to groom and mould Alice into the idealized image he really cares about, and if Alice deviates from that image in any way, Bob would lash out at her, forcing Alice to maintain the image Bob has of her.
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