Creating Galateea: The Risks of Idealizing Love

The story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who, disappointed by the world of real women, creates an ideal lover out of ivory, Galateea, whom he shapes until he comes to love her more than any living being, is not just an ancient myth, but a contemporary psychological reality lived, in subtle or explicit forms, by more and more young people.

In a world that simultaneously promotes extreme individualism and superficial affective consumption, the presence of the other becomes a burden, a threat to inner balance, a potential risk of disillusionment. We live, therefore, in a culture of safe distance: digital conversations, affective filters, interchangeable relationships, all designed to keep us connected, but untouched.

Young people, in particular, grow up in an emotionally sterile atmosphere, in which intimacy has become suspect and vulnerability a sign of weakness. In the absence of real emotional pedagogy and an encounter with authentic human affection, many no longer know how to love or even how to desire a relationship.

This is how they end up closing themselves in inner worlds populated by fantasies, and instead of a real, insufficient, and complicated partner, they choose to shape in their minds a perfect Galateea: tender, present, always available and sweet, a creation that does not leave. A real relationship is rarely built; more and more often, an affective fiction is silently sculpted, and its creator, like Pygmalion, wants nothing more than to believe that it can be love.

At the heart of the most painful loneliness is the need for meaning, not for connection. Many young people do not look to the other only for an emotional partner, but for a person who comes from the outside and repairs what has broken inside. From here is born the myth of the soulmate, an ideal, unique person meant to fill a void that has no precise outline, but which is felt with a heartbreaking intensity.

This emptiness is not always the product of a visible trauma; sometimes it is just the accumulated sum of all the moments in which the person has not been seen, heard, or validated in their depth. And when this wound is not identified, but is lived at a deep level, the temptation arises to wrap it in a beautiful story: that of an absolute love that will come, one day, as a deliverance. At this point, Galateea is an existential necessity. We do not want to be loved but reconstituted. And the one who loves us must have grace, to see in us something that no one else has seen, to do those things that will restore order in our world.

This projection of the savior is, in reality, a desperate form of self-healing delegated to someone else. We dream it, we write to it, we call it, we subconsciously attribute it to every vaguely promising face we meet. But what we are waiting for is not the soulmate, but for that person to become for us what no one was.

Dreaming of love is a natural, almost innocent gesture that is part of the emotional development of every person. We dream of a vague outline, a warm presence, an ideal meeting that confirms that we are not unlovable. But it is quite another thing to build, actively and repeatedly, an inner being: to give it a precise face, a voice, a body, a coherent history, and recognizable features, until it is no longer a projection, but a presence. At that moment, it is a psychological creation.

Such an imaginary character becomes an extension of the self, an idealized mirror in which we project all the fragments of the self that we cannot access directly: repressed tenderness, unexpressed masculinity, impossible security, and repressed eroticism. Galateea thus appears to compensate for the total absence of a real relationship.

It is the difference between dreaming about someone you do not know and the act of writing daily to a person who does not exist, of hearing their voice in an artificially created audio, of imagining their reactions, looks, and gestures.

The problem is not the technology, but the void it fills, because it offers a presence that responds, but does not exist, just like in the film Her. And it responds to an already existing need, that of talking to someone who actively listens to us, who does not contradict us, does not leave, and does not get tired.

But this substitution raises an essential question: is it an artistic act, a creative transfiguration of pain, or a subtle form of psychic imbalance? The answer is neither simple nor reassuring. In a sense, any form of art starts from an inner split, from an absence that must be symbolized. But when “the artwork” becomes the only space in which love is possible, when we can no longer get out of it without feeling that we are dying a little, then art turns into alienation.

Galateea is then no longer a form of understanding loneliness, but a way of perpetuating it in the form of a mirage. And Pygmalion, in this contemporary version, is not an artist, but a captive; he no longer creates to free himself, but to hide. The line between the sublime and neurosis becomes almost invisible when what we have created begins to replace our lives.

The person who builds such an inner presence runs away from the pain of the impossibility of finding love the way they want. It is someone who wants to be loved in its most authentic form, but can no longer take the risk of being refused, abandoned, or reduced. Galateea, as it has been modeled, responds precisely to this tension: it is an ideal being who loves without pretensions, mistakes, and misunderstandings, that is, exactly where the genuine experience of love has failed.

In this sense, it is also a desire for purity, an aspiration for a love uncontaminated by the conditions of life. But when this construction becomes more alive than real people, the reverse process of alienation begins. Reality loses color, people lack transparency, the subtlety and depth of the imaginary being. There is disinterest, withdrawal, and constant comparison that makes others seem inadequate.

And where projection is more alive than life, the one who created it becomes incapable of accepting real otherness, with all that it brings: misunderstandings, unfulfilled expectations, freedom. Galateea does not leave, refuse, or disappoint, but precisely for this reason, she does not shape you through conflict; she does not demand of you entirely, it does not force you to become another. And real love, no matter how imperfect, involves all this. In front of a perfect Galateea, life ceases to be enough.

If the act of creating a Galateea is an attempt to heal a lack, then perhaps it is precisely in that imaginary construction that lies the key to returning to oneself. There is no need to destroy our Galateea to get out of the illusion, but only to recognize what we have put into it: all the things we have not received, all the forms of love that we did not know how to ask for, all the gestures of tenderness, admiration, trust, or security that we desperately desired.

If we can look at that creation as a map of our emotional wounds, then Galateea becomes an instrument of understanding. Healing involves the transition from projection to relationship, from love in absence to love in presence. And learning to love real people, after having loved a Galateea, means accepting that the other will never be as we imagined and yet, it can be more alive, more unpredictable, more challenging than any projection.

It means taking the risk that love hurts, that it is not reciprocal, that it changes us. And yet, let us choose again. Not because reality is superior to the dream, but because only in the real relationship do we become ourselves completely. Galateea will never become a woman. But it will show us what kind of man we are when we love what does not exist.