Murdoch captures something that catches most of us off guard: our idealized versions of strangers often exceed what actual intimacy demands of us. We project perfection onto the unknown precisely because they ask nothing back—no patience through their moods, no forgiveness of our shortcomings, no mutual vulnerability. A person scrolling through a stranger's carefully curated Instagram feels a purer admiration than someone married twenty years, which tells us something uncomfortable about love itself: it thrives in distance and dies a little in the messy dailiness of being known. She's not celebrating romance so much as exposing how easily our affections prefer the blank canvas to the complicated, fully-rendered person sitting across the breakfast table.