There’s a line from Timothy Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage that I kept coming back to walking out of the theatre: that to be loved but not known is comforting but superficial — it’s the pleasure of being adored for a version of yourself that isn’t fully seen. What we actually want, and what terrifies us in equal measure, is to be fully known and loved anyway. Jean’s kiss is almost the inverse, and somehow worse: Peter isn’t being loved at all. He’s being performed at, by someone with total access to MJ’s memories and zero actual feeling for him. It has all the information of intimacy and none of the substance, which is exactly why it wrecks him. He can’t tell the difference between being known and being studied. 

I’ve caught myself doing a version of that same math. Not long ago, I was catching up with someone I’d once been on the edge of dating a while back. Half-joking, I asked him, “What did you even like about me? We’d only known each other a month or two — I don’t think we knew each other well enough to actually like each other.” He thought about it for a second and said, “I don’t know. What did you like about me?” And I couldn’t answer him either. We just sat there, laughing, both unable to name a single specific thing — because there wasn’t one yet. We liked the idea of each other. 

MJ’s line isn’t comforting or superficial; instead, it is arguably the hardest, most honest sentence in the movie. She’s not punishing Peter — she’s refusing to fake an intimacy that isn’t there, even though faking it would be so much kinder in the moment. In a film full of body-swaps, secret identities, and memory spells, she’s the only person who insists on the real thing or nothing at all. 

Maybe MJ was right. You really can’t love someone you don’t know.