Love, Lies and Launches: The Strange Science of PR Relationships

They say you can’t fake chemistry. In PR, you often do. With a few staged paparazzi shots, a well-timed public appearance, and a couple of suggestive social media posts, a couple is born. Whether it’s real, rumoured, or entirely invented, a public relationship can soften someone’s image, launch a career, bury a scandal, or sell a fantasy. Sometimes all at once.

To an outsider, it sounds ridiculous. But within a small circle of entertainment and PR, it makes perfect sense. If audiences are going to obsess over who someone’s dating anyway, there’s no harm in pointing the obsession somewhere useful.

The fantasy economy: Why relationships sell

From a psychological perspective, public relationships tap into what’s known as parasocial idealisation. The idea that people build one-sided attachments to public figures and experience real emotional reactions to imaginary dynamics. It’s common, particularly when a celebrity is styled to feel relatable or aspirational.

In the US especially, where the idea of “having it all” still sits quietly underneath so much of the entertainment economy, romantic success is seen as emotional proof that someone is thriving. A beautiful, talented, successful person in love completes the fantasy. It makes them look balanced, desirable and, more importantly, safe to idolise.

Taylor Swift is a good example of how a personal life, whether private or performative, can become part of a celebrity’s narrative. Her relationships are not just moments in time but part of a wider mythology. Each one becomes a chapter, a motif, a turning point. Whether or not the presentation is intentional, the outcome is the same: her audience feels personally invested in the emotional trajectory. They get a love story, a heartbreak, and eventually, a form of closure. For many fans, it feels intimate. Which, from a marketing perspective, is gold.

What’s being sold here isn’t the relationship itself. It’s the illusion of access.

The ones you fancy can’t be taken

Of course, for some celebrities, a relationship is more of a threat than an asset. When someone’s following is built on fantasy, public relationships can puncture it.

I once had a client who was, for lack of a better phrase, unfairly attractive. His audience was made up almost entirely of women and gay men, most of whom had built up their own imaginary connection with him. He’d actually been with the same girlfriend since they were sixteen. She was kind, intelligent, and very clear with me: she didn’t want to appear publicly alongside him because she knew what would happen. She’d seen what fans were capable of. She told me, quite plainly, that if she saw people online insulting her looks, it would destroy her self-confidence.

What’s interesting is that she wasn’t chasing visibility, she was avoiding humiliation. And she wasn’t wrong. I’ve seen fans tear people to shreds for dating someone they’ve decided belongs to them. Some think they’re being protective. Others think they’re being funny. But the effect is the same.

The psychology here is uncomfortable. Many fans form what’s called attachment-based projection, emotionally substituting themselves into the lives of people they admire. When that illusion is challenged by a real-world partner, it can trigger jealousy, anger, and even grief. It’s not always conscious. But it’s common.

When the real partner stays hidden

ot everyone who dates a celebrity wants a public life. Some people fall for someone in the spotlight and genuinely don’t want their face associated with it. They’re not insecure. They’re not controlling. They just don’t want to become gossip. They have normal jobs, regular lives, and no interest in being discussed, judged or torn apart by strangers online. They don’t want their looks insulted. They don’t want to be analysed in comment threads. And they don’t want to be told they’re not “right” for someone they met in real life, not through a screen.

This is often the hardest kind of relationship to manage. You can feel that they trust you to keep things quiet, but also that the act of being hidden starts to press on something. I’ve had cases where public decoys were used to draw attention elsewhere. Not out of manipulation, but because a quiet relationship can't always withstand loud curiosity. Sometimes, it’s the only way to protect something that wasn’t built for scrutiny.

That said, there are plenty of cases where we don’t bother staging anything at all. For some celebrities, it actually benefits them to look single. Or it simply isn’t a priority. When someone isn’t trying to shift public opinion or sell a story, keeping things private doesn’t feel strategic. It just feels calm.

But even when both people agree it’s for the best, it’s not without cost. I’ve seen partners say they’re fine with it, then quietly withdraw when the public pairing becomes too convincing. There’s a strange emotional dissonance that happens. Watching someone you love hold hands with a stranger for press shots, or seeing their name trending next to someone else’s. Even if you understand it’s fake, it’s still weird. You can see it in their face sometimes. Not quite jealousy, but a kind of internal flinch. The discomfort of knowing something isn’t real, but still feeling it anyway.

They’re not asking to be famous. They’re just asking not to feel erased. And when their partner is doing couple shoots and publicly soft launching someone else, that silence can start to sting. Not because the relationship is breaking down. But because the performance around it keeps getting louder.Timing, image and identity

From a media psychology standpoint, romantic narratives are uniquely powerful because they engage multiple neural pathways: reward, trust, familiarity and memory. When a public figure is seen as “in love,” their brand becomes easier to categorise. It anchors their identity in something audiences understand. It signals control. A likeable person. A stable one. A marketable one.

And timing, of course, is everything. A relationship rumour surfacing just before a film release or album drop isn’t a coincidence. Neither is a carefully blurry photo leaving a hotel. Whether the relationship is real or not is often irrelevant. It exists to create context.

Even real couples are sometimes pressured to perform. Smiling for press shots. Coordinating outfits. Delaying breakups until a campaign finishes. The relationship might be genuine, but the delivery is designed.

It's all a bit odd, but it works

I don’t personally relate to the obsession, but I see it every day. The idea of caring that much about who a stranger is dating seems strange to me. But in the celerity world, it’s completely normal. Within a certain circle, it’s expected. And it works.

I’ve sat in rooms listening to friends talk about how “adorable” a couple is, completely unaware that it was a pairing we had quietly assembled as a team a few weeks earlier. They weren’t doing anything wrong, they were just responding to what they were shown. It’s a reminder that perception, more than reality, is what shapes reputation. And that public opinion often has very little to do with truth.

Behind every photo, there’s usually a story. And sometimes the real story is far less romantic than the one fans are projecting onto it. But in the strange machinery of fame, where identity, emotion and marketing constantly blur, the truth often becomes irrelevant. The image wins.

And in some cases, so does the couple. Even if they don’t technically exist.