It’s Pedro Now, It Was Chris Before: How the Internet Falls In and Out of Love

by Aayushi Hemnani

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The internet is a strange place to love someone. It feels personal but it never is. You have probably read or said that before, and yet it keeps proving itself true. In all my years of being online, and there have been many, think Orkut and MSN Messenger, the internet has changed so often that I barely notice anymore. It has learned how to love loudly and forget softly. It forgives, rewrites, and moves on before anyone can catch their breath.

Right now, it is in love with Pedro Pascal. Or at least it was a couple of weeks ago. I realised it late one night, scrolling half asleep, half bored. Every few posts were him. Pedro smiling. Pedro hugging fans. Pedro saying something charming about being a “slutty daddy.” I did not choose it. The algorithm decided for me. That is how it works. You do not fall in love on the internet. You find yourself already in it.

For a few weeks, he was everywhere. His warmth and humour, his soft voice and self-effacing charm, were treated not as personality traits but as evidence of moral goodness. The internet collectively adopted him. He became something larger than himself, a symbol of safety, a collective crush we all quietly agreed upon. Then, just as quickly, it began to fade.

The same feed that builds someone up can flatten them just as easily. I have seen it happen in real time. One week you cannot scroll without his face, the next week the tone shifts and the comments grow cold. Affection becomes fatigue. The love curdles. The internet loves loudly, but it does not stay.

Before Pedro, it was the Chrises, Evans, Hemsworth, Pine. They were a cleaner era of desire, dependable and symmetrical, the kind of men that made you feel safe without making you think. Then came Andrew Garfield, who cried in interviews and thanked his mother. He made sincerity fashionable again. After him, Paul Mescal, with his soft heartbreak and short shorts, turned sadness into aesthetic. Then Harris Dickinson, quiet and careful, the man who seemed like he would listen more than he spoke. Each of them had their turn.

Even W Magazine and Vogue Australia joined the game, publishing glossy guides to “the internet’s boyfriends” as if they were a recurring cultural event. I remember laughing when I saw them, but also saving the links. We pretend to be ironic about these crushes, but we are not.

The sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl described something like this back in 1956. They called it the parasocial relationship, a one-sided intimacy between audience and performer. What used to happen between one viewer and a television host now happens between millions of people at once. The illusion of closeness has become collaborative.

That is what makes the internet boyfriend work. He feels close enough to reach, but still slightly out of frame. Famous enough to admire, ordinary enough to imagine knowing. We take fragments, a podcast quote, a photo, a moment of kindness, and stitch them together into something whole. Pedro becomes comfort. Paul becomes heartbreak. Andrew becomes sincerity. Chris becomes dependability.

Andrew Garfield, in particular, became an entire genre. His flirty banter with Chicken Shop Date host Amelia Dimoldenberg turned into a global fantasy. Their twelve-minute interview became a love story written by the internet. We projected what we needed onto him.

But it is not just the men who live through this loop. The internet’s longest-running mirror has always been Taylor Swift.

Taylor is not the internet’s boyfriend. She is its queen, its mirror, its most enduring experiment. The release of her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, proves it again. Every era she reinvents herself, but this one feels almost prophetic. It is about performance and exhaustion, about being watched and consumed, about glamour as both armour and burden. She sings about the act of being looked at, of being endlessly interpreted. She is not a participant in the cycle anymore. She is its architect.

When I scroll through her new music videos, the sequins and satin feel heavier than ever. It is not performance for applause. It is performance as survival. Taylor has become the prototype of how to exist under constant affection and scrutiny at once. The internet builds her up, dissects her, worships her shoes, mocks her lyrics, and still returns for more. She is both adored and undone by visibility. She embodies the contradiction perfectly: materialistic but sincere, exhausted but luminous, watched but in control.

She is the lesson and the test. Every new boyfriend, every new archetype, every Pedro and Paul and Jacob, follows a blueprint she helped create. The internet did not just grow around her. It grew through her.

All of this has become the logic of how we love now. The internet does not really love people. It loves symbols. It builds them quickly and efficiently, and every one comes with an expiration date. Visibility fuels the adoration, but it also ensures collapse. The more we see of someone, the less special they feel. What was once authentic becomes overexposed. Affection turns to irony.

It happened with the Chrises. It happened with Andrew. It is already happening with Pedro. Nothing about them changes. The audience just gets tired.

Jacob Elordi seems to understand it better than most. He plays the part of the boyfriend but at a distance. Detached, self-aware, half playing along. His coolness is his shield. He knows the internet cannot love what it fully understands. Taylor Swift knows that too, though her scale is mythic. 

We are not watching fandom anymore. We are watching the evolution of the parasocial bond. These relationships are one-sided, but the feelings are real enough to make people cry, to defend strangers online, to mistake empathy for intimacy. They move too fast to last. The internet loves like an algorithm, fast, abundant and forgetful.

And yet, there is something recognisably human underneath it. Maybe this is how we practise connection now. Loving someone who does not know you is safer than staying close to those who do. A parasocial attachment asks nothing of you except attention. It offers the illusion of care without the risk of disappointment.

I still remember Orkut. The neon testimonials, the pink fonts, the slow-loading photographs. Affection was clumsy then, but it was patient. We waited for things. Now, everything happens at Wi-Fi speed. Love, attention, even outrage.

That is what has changed, not the emotion itself but the rhythm of it. The internet has taught us to consume people the way we consume everything else. We adore and discard with the same motion of the thumb. We chase novelty, mistake familiarity for intimacy, and call it connection.

One day it is Pedro. The next it is Paul. Then Jacob. Then Taylor again, but not as a crush, as a cultural argument. The names change, the ache does not.

We build them up. We bring them down. We call it culture, or fandom, or discourse. Really, it is a rehearsal for care. A safe version of love that we can abandon whenever it asks too much of us.

It might sound bleak, but I do not think it is. There is still tenderness in the repetition. Each new obsession proves that we still care about something. That we still want to believe in connection, even if it is temporary.

It is Pedro now. It was Chris before. It will be someone else soon. We will build them up again, write the same captions, say he just feels real, and then scroll past him like we never cared at all. The internet loves collectively, creatively, and fleetingly. It burns bright, fades fast, and leaves behind something strangely soft.

The pattern does not stop at celebrities. It extends to us. We learn from the culture we create. If visibility brings both closeness and exhaustion, we start curating our own personas in the same way, open but controlled, relatable but safe. The internet boyfriend is not just a figure of fascination. He is the template. He teaches us how to perform sincerity without revealing too much, how to seem available while staying protected.

That is the blueprint now. The cycle of building up and breaking down is not just reserved for the celebrity. It is just as much, ours. About how we have learned to live, to love, and to exist online — fast, fragile, and endlessly refreshed.

It always comes back to the same thing. We want to be seen, but not for too long. We want to love, but from a safe distance. The internet makes that possible — affection without effort, intimacy without consequence. Maybe that’s why we keep coming back. Not because it feels real, but because it almost does.