The Morality of Falling in Love with Imaginary Friends

So. like, I’m watching this 2019 movie right now (well, not actually now now, but I reached the three-quarter mark a few moments ago, at which point I paused to write this) called Auggie that’s about:

Felix, an architect in his 60s who has been pushed out of the firm he helped build and is now at home grumpily adjusting to unwanted retirement. His busy wife and grownup daughter have no great need of him these days so poor, emasculated Felix takes comfort in his hi-tech retirement gift: a pair of “Auggie” glasses, through which the wearer can see an “augmented reality companion”, a virtual-reality hologram of exactly the kind of submissively understanding person your subconscious wants to see – in Felix’s case, an extremely attractive young woman.

Review in The Guardian

Felix is initially unsure about the merits of interacting with an illusory persona projected realistically into his surroundings, by his side and, eventually, into his bed but as time goes on he begins to develop feelings for this ‘attractive young woman’ and then, naturally (according to the flow and expectations of this kind of movie) his wife finds him in flagrante delicto with his glasses on and little else (if you know what I mean). Felix’s wife knows full well what these glasses do (because she tried a pair earlier in the movie) and so, feeling insulted and demeaned, she storms off in a rage.

And I’m thinking: how can she be mad at him for falling in love with an imaginary friend?

I’d already told the wife yesterday that I had started to watch this movie and asked her what she thought of Felix’s actions and she proffered the opinion that Felix was being unfaithful. I nodded and smiled (as advised by a very good book I’ve been reading called The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters (who postulates that our first reaction to many unpalatable things people say comes from an inner chimp that has the tendency to act out anxiety, aggression, overwhelmed feelings and emotional/verbal/physical (tick any that apply) violence).

And yet still, I’m wondering what is wrong with indulging in a fantasy scenario where one’s companion is no one other than a voice in one’s head.

It’s like, I could write a story in which a character that is a thinly (or not) disguised version of myself meets another person and has interactions in which the two fictional characters fall in love, get married, have children, grow old together and die a sweet and natural death in one another’s arms, but I don’t think that this would constitute any kind of breaking of my marriage vows. Novels like this get written all the time. People write novels where a killer slaughters innocent people left, right and centre but, in the real world, no one is put on trial, sent to prison or executed. Even if a person writes what amounts to a (fictional (of course)) confession of having killed the pope and all his subjects, he would not be condemned to death in reality (what the Holy Roman Church thought of that would, of course, be another matter).

So what’s the fuss about here?

I dunno. But I’ll tell you one thing: if people could see what was in the head of another person … Well, let’s just say that you could get a fair few best-selling novels out of the fallout.

Which gives me an idea! 🐸