There is a person who passed in front of your eyes for months and you never even noticed them. Then they changed their hair, showed up at a big competition, appeared in a few videos - and suddenly they look irresistible. Nothing about them has changed in any real sense. What changed is how many times your brain has seen them.

Psychologists do not call that love. They call it the mere exposure effect and have been documenting it since the sixties, when American psychologist Robert Zajonc demonstrated something that sounded almost insulting at the time: the more often we see something or someone, the more we like them. For no reason. Without a single conversation. Purely from repetition.

Aurora López, a psychologist specialising in relationships and couples therapy, explains that two things are working at once here. The second is the halo effect - when we see one highly visible positive trait in someone and then unconsciously attribute everything else to them as well. „We see someone shine at one thing and we believe they are perfect at everything else. That is a generalisation bias“, she says. Good-looking, famous, the hero of one moment - and we are already assigning them loyalty, kindness, emotional maturity. „The judgement comes fast and without any real data.“

The mechanism is physiological, not romantic. „Every time you see a face, the brain processes it. The second time the cognitive effort is smaller, but by the tenth time that face is already comfortable, predictable and safe to the nervous system“, López explains. The problem is that the brain does not distinguish „this is familiar to me“ from „this attracts me“. It reads comfort as a positive signal.

And here is the part worth saying out loud: today you do not decide what becomes familiar to you. The algorithm decides. Some engineer at some company set the parameters, and the faces that will circle in front of your eyes for the next three weeks have already been chosen. The industry making money from that has no interest whatsoever in explaining to you how it works.

López offers a few questions for checking what is real. What do you actually know about this person - if you like their public image, then you like a character you have filled in yourself with everything you want to find. What happens when they disappear from the screen - log off for two weeks, and if the interest cools, that was familiarity, not attraction. Are you drawn to this person or to the way you imagine they would make you feel. And finally: check in real life, because genuine attraction grows in awkward moments, not in perfectly edited videos.

„We live in a world designed to produce desire, and very few people stop to ask themselves whether what they feel is real or constructed“, the psychologist says. Next time you sigh over a face you had not even registered until now, don't go looking for fate in it. Sometimes it is just an algorithm that did its job well.