Loving a Brand, Not a Person - How Celebrity Culture Distorts Intimacy #940917

In a culture where visibility is currency and identity is increasingly performed, love has become vulnerable to forces it was never designed to survive.
Loving a Brand, Not a Person: How Celebrity Culture Distorts Intimacy examines why romantic relationships involving public figures so often collapse—and why their failures are not merely personal, but structural. Drawing on high-profile celebrity case studies, anonymous interviews, psychological research, and cultural analysis, Timothée Luwewe argues that fame transforms intimacy into performance, vulnerability into content, and partners into extensions of a personal brand.
Rather than treating celebrity breakups as gossip or moral failure, this book reframes them as evidence. It explores how branding reshapes identity, how surveillance exhausts emotional life, how power imbalance silences needs, and how social media turns love into labor. From the monetization of vulnerability to the audience’s role as a third partner, Luwewe reveals how intimacy erodes when it is denied privacy, imperfection, and time.
Crucially, the book extends beyond celebrity culture. As ordinary people increasingly curate their relationships online, document emotional life, and seek validation through visibility, the pressures once reserved for the famous are becoming universal. Celebrity love, the book argues, is not exceptional—it is predictive.
At once philosophical and practical, Loving a Brand, Not a Person is a study of modern intimacy under exposure, and a call to reclaim shelter, privacy, and relational truth in a culture that demands performance. It is not a book about who failed at love—but about what love requires to endure.