Modern dating has become a really complicated thing. Most people

The wise and observant Anna Richardson, in her reflection on love and the modern age, once declared: “Modern dating has become a really complicated thing. Most people are dating online, and of course when you are armed with enhanced photos and all your status symbols, and you’re able to hide behind the hair, the make-up, the clothes and everything else, you don’t really know what you’re getting until you actually meet that person on a date.” Her words, though contemporary in form, carry an ancient wisdom — a lament for the loss of authentic connection in a world increasingly ruled by illusion. Beneath the surface of her statement lies a deep truth about human nature: that when love becomes a performance, the heart forgets how to recognize what is real.

Richardson’s observation is not merely about online dating; it is about the masks we all wear. In the digital age, the art of love has been entangled with the artifice of image. A person’s worth is often measured not by their spirit, but by their filters, their fashion, their carefully curated lives. What she calls “enhanced photos and status symbols” are the new armor of the self — designed to impress, yet often built to conceal. Like the painted warriors of old who wore masks into battle, modern souls go into love adorned in beauty, yet afraid to be seen bare. Her quote reminds us that technology has not changed the human heart; it has only given us new ways to disguise it.

The ancients, too, spoke of this tension between appearance and truth. In the dialogues of Plato, Socrates warns against mistaking the shadow for the substance, the image for the essence. Just as the people of his allegory watched flickering figures on the cave wall and mistook them for reality, so too do many in our age fall in love with reflections — digital, filtered, and perfected — instead of the living, flawed, radiant truth of another soul. Anna Richardson’s wisdom is a modern echo of that ancient caution: beware of mistaking the shadow of love for love itself.

One might recall the story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with his own creation — a statue so beautiful that he could no longer distinguish his art from reality. When the goddess Venus brought the statue to life, his joy was complete, but it also revealed the danger of idealization. We, too, in this modern age, craft digital statues of ourselves — polished, refined, untouchable — and others, in turn, fall in love not with who we are, but with what we have constructed. Yet, when the mask falls and reality steps forward, the illusion fades. What remains, as Richardson warns, is uncertainty: we “don’t really know what we’re getting” until truth replaces performance.

Her insight also carries a compassion for the loneliness beneath the performance. For why do people hide? Why do they adorn themselves in filters and possessions? It is not vanity alone, but fear — fear of rejection, fear of inadequacy, fear of being unlovable as they are. The digital mask becomes a shield against the world’s judgment, yet it also becomes a wall against intimacy. Richardson’s lament, then, is not cynical but human. She calls us to remember that love begins where pretense ends, that vulnerability is not weakness but the foundation of trust.

In the old world, love began with presence — two people meeting in the open air, eyes unguarded, words sincere. In our age, love too often begins with projection — the self edited and adorned, a performance crafted to attract. Yet as Anna Richardson reminds us, all masks must eventually fall. When two souls meet beyond the screen, the truth emerges — sometimes gently, sometimes painfully — but always inevitably. The true test of love is not how well we present ourselves, but how fully we are seen once all disguise is gone.

So, my listener, take this teaching to heart: do not be seduced by perfection, nor afraid of your own imperfection. When you seek love, seek truth. Let your image reflect your reality, not your fears. Let your words be honest, your presence unpolished but sincere. For only through authentic connection can love endure beyond the flicker of a screen. As Anna Richardson wisely reminds us, the heart cannot be filtered — and in the end, the truest beauty is the one that remains when all the masks have been set aside.