Performative Intimacy and Pretending to Love

Performative Intimacy and Pretending to Love is a recurring pattern in which affection is treated as something that can be performed for security, money, or the appearance of a workable relationship. Through Jasper’s history of romantic cons and Hazel’s marriage to Byron, the novel shows how gestures can simulate love while concealing its absence. Their later relationships complicate that pattern: Jasper’s practiced tenderness becomes sincere with Voda, while Hazel’s second chance begins with a commitment not to pretend.

Affection as a Performance

For both Jasper and Hazel, pretending to love is not simply a false declaration. It involves adopting the habits and outward signs of intimacy in the hope that the relationship will provide some other benefit. Jasper used affection to reassure women he was deceiving for money. Hazel, by contrast, entered marriage believing that security and commitment might give her enough time to develop genuine love. The difference in their circumstances does not erase the shared wager: each imagines that a relationship can be made livable, or made to look loving, even when the feeling itself is missing.

The novel connects that wager to a broader distinction between lived experience and simulation. Hazel eventually recognizes that constant pretense is itself a kind of virtual life, as artificial as the technological simulations associated with Byron. The comparison makes emotional performance more than a private failing: it is a substitute reality that can organize how a person behaves and what they allow themselves to acknowledge. The question is not only whether affection is genuine, but what is lost when a person continually acts as if reality were better than it is.

Jasper: From Cons to Sincere Touch

Jasper’s earlier relationships establish the pattern in its most calculated form. He had never come close to loving the women who fell in love with him. In his cons, he cuddled, massaged, and offered other signs of tenderness to create a false sense of security. His physical arousal was genuine, but the affection those gestures implied was not. Intimacy thus became a tool: his body could communicate a promise that he had no intention of keeping.

His relationship with Voda presents a striking reversal. Jasper knows she is not falling in love with him; she enjoys having sex with him while his attention wanders to a dolphin, and otherwise carries on with work, exercise, reading, or watching something without making his activities her concern. Her independence makes the terms of their connection unusually plain. Jasper even notices that Voda is the richest woman he has ever known, yet he has neither the urge nor the ability to swindle her.

When Jasper cautiously raises the absence of love, Voda tells him she has no time for dating and that he is in no danger of being replaced. He tries to imagine pretending to be loved, turning around the role he once played for others. But the familiar gestures no longer carry the same lie. He has developed real fondness for Voda, including for her aged skin, and touching her now expresses what he feels rather than manufacturing reassurance. His response is not a sudden transformation into someone without a past: guilt about his former life presses on him, and he cries in Voda’s atrium, among porcelain plants that cannot live. The scene places his remorse beside the carefully made, lifelike setting, while his altered tenderness marks a change from performing intimacy to experiencing it.

Hazel: Security Without the Love She Expected

Hazel’s pretense begins from a different calculation. She says she had pretended to love someone for money, though marrying Byron was not originally her idea. His multimillionaire proposal offered protection from many material consequences, and she thought she could train herself to love him, much as a person learns a demanding skill. She had never been in love and imagined that, at minimum, she might reach a stable state in which life with him did not bring acute suffering. Her expectations were shaped by a willingness to adapt herself to whoever wanted her and by the belief that being wanted was fortunate.

That arrangement depended on concealing the gap between security and attachment. Hazel admits that she realized early in the marriage that she would not be able to love Byron, but did not tell him. She thought it seemed unreasonable to give up the life his wealth offered; other people’s insistence that she was lucky also led her to expect that she would eventually feel lucky herself. In recalling her parents, who were opposites and fought but remained committed, she explains why she had treated compatibility as something that might matter less than endurance. Her later account does not make the deception disappear: it names both the pressures behind her decision and her responsibility for withholding the truth.

Before a brain download that may bring Byron back into her life, Hazel practices an apology in a diner bathroom. She wants to leave him with kindness rather than superiority, and acknowledges that someone else might truly have admired his genius where she had only pretended to. She also wonders whether her failure to love him contributed, even fractionally, to the hardening of his heart. The imagined apology turns emotional honesty into an obligation Hazel believes she owes, even when she fears that Byron may imprison or control her rather than kill her.

Refusing the Performance

Hazel’s final change is not a promise that every future relationship will become romantic love. Speaking with Jasper as they flee, she recognizes a parallel between them: he used to pretend to love people for money, and she had also performed love within a relationship tied to wealth and security. Their shared history allows them to discuss desire without presenting either person as having mastered it.

When Jasper explains that sex with him may involve mentally withdrawing into a dolphin fantasy, Hazel asks whether she would have to pretend it was wonderful. She recalls that before Liver she had often acted as though she were in love with people she slept with, and recognizes how thoroughly she had learned to cover any distance between experience and expectation with manufactured enthusiasm. Her account of enjoying an encounter with Liver even when it was only mediocre, without denying that fact, gives the change a concrete precedent: honesty need not turn an imperfect experience into a failure.

Hazel and Jasper choose to begin with a different agreement. She is not interested in loving him, and he is not trying to get her money; she can accept his limits without performing approval, while he need not pretend to offer a kind of emotional connection he does not feel in that moment. As they kiss, Hazel closes her eyes rather than watching Jasper for cues about how she should respond. The gesture signals a small but decisive release from performing for an audience. Her second chance, as she understands it, depends on no longer faking anything—not on guaranteeing love, but on allowing intimacy to begin without a false claim about what it means.