Scroll through your DMs or your contacts list for a moment, just to realize how you’re automatically categorizing people.
There’s the one you’re trying to impress. The one who’s always available when you need an ego boost. The one you keep warm with the occasional like, just in case. The ex you’d never get back with, but somehow haven’t fully released. The person you text when the first choice falls through.
We all have them. And most of us don’t think too hard about what it says that we do.
We live in the age of optimization. We curate our playlists, our feeds, our aesthetics, our personalities for different platforms. So it’s perhaps inevitable that we’ve started to curate people too, treating connections like items in a portfolio. Trophies for status. Backups for security. Experiences to add to the synopsis of a life well-lived.
The logic feels almost rational.
“Keep your options open.”
“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”
“Always have a plan B.”
The self-help internet endorses it. TikTok memes get viral by making us laugh of it. Dating apps are built around it.
But here’s what that logic quietly costs you: the ability to actually be with anyone.
When you’re managing a portfolio, you’re above every connection, comparing and strategizing. You’re never fully in any one of them. And that distance, maintained in the name of safety, is one of the loneliest places you can be.
The core question worth asking, before we go any further:
Are you building a relationship?
Or are you seeking validation, security, or a story to tell?
1. The Portfolio Approach: How We Learned to Collect
Nobody decides to start treating people like assets. It happens gradually, shaped by a culture that applies market logic to everything, including other human beings.
Dating apps didn’t invent this, but they perfected it. The infinite scroll. The swipe that signals: next. The architecture of constant optionality, which trains you to believe that someone better is always one tap away, so committing attention to the person in front of you feels like a strategic mistake.
You develop what psychologists call a maximizer mentality: not looking to connect, but to optimize. Always comparing. Always reserving judgment.
Social media layers something else on top: the social ranking dimension. Who you’re seen with, who notices you, whose attention you’re visibly receiving—all of this becomes social currency.
The person you’re interested in stops being just a person and starts being data in a calculation about your own worth.
Underneath all this optimization, though, is something simpler and more honest: fear. Fear of choosing wrong. Fear of being alone. Fear of vulnerability.
The portfolio approach isn’t greed—it’s armor.
You hedge because committing fully to one connection means accepting the risk of being genuinely hurt by it.
So you keep multiple conversations alive. You stay friendly with the ex just in case. You avoid labels because labels close off options. And all of it feels like emotional intelligence, until you notice that you haven’t actually been present with anyone in longer than you can remember.
Reality check. Honest answer:
Look at your last week of interactions. How many were driven by genuine curiosity about another person, and how many were driven by strategy, boredom, or the quiet anxiety of having no options?
2. Pursuing the Shiny Object: The Trophy Chase
Some people in our collection aren’t really people to us, not fully. They’re symbols. They represent something we want to prove about ourselves: that we’re desirable, impressive, daring, or cool enough to have attracted this particular person’s attention.
You know the feeling. Pursuing someone because everyone else wants them too. Being seen with them. Having their attention function as a kind of social upgrade. You’re not really interested in who they are at 7am, grumpy and half-awake, or what they’re afraid of, or what they care about with the door closed. You’re interested in what having them says about you.
This is intimacy as status move. And it’s more common than most of us are comfortable admitting.
The pursuit has its own energy, too. The chase is exciting precisely because it’s a challenge: a puzzle to solve, a lock to pick.
But something strange tends to happen when you actually get there. The validation, it turns out, has a very short shelf life. The trophy loses its shine almost immediately, because trophies can’t actually give you what you were looking for.
They’re mirrors.
They only show you your own hunger reflected back at you.
They can’t see you.
In Unscripted, there’s a moment when Hannah finally gets close to the person she’s been pursuing—the boy whose reputation made him seem like the ultimate proof of her own desirability. And instead of triumph, she feels something else: the sudden, disorienting visibility of a real human being where the trophy used to be. The chase was always more about her than about him. The catch just makes that undeniable.
Reality check:
Have you ever pursued someone, or stayed with someone, primarily because of what it said about you, rather than how you felt being with them?
What were you really trying to prove, and to whom?
3. The Safety Net You Keep in the Wings
For every trophy we chase, there’s often a quieter figure waiting in the wings. Someone we keep close not because we’ve chosen them fully, but because their presence is reliably comforting. Someone we believe won’t reject us. Someone whose affection feels safe enough to borrow when we need it, without the risk of actually committing to it.
This is the backup. And the backup isn’t a villain or a sidekick in the story. They’re usually someone genuinely kind, genuinely present, genuinely worth more than the role they’ve been handed. That’s exactly what makes this dynamic so worth examining. Because keeping a backup isn’t malicious. It’s something quieter and more insidious: emotional hoarding.
You’re storing someone for your own potential future use, and calling it friendship.
The backup receives something real from you: your warmth, your vulnerability, your 2am confessions.
But they don’t receive your full attention, your full desire, your full choice. They get the parts of you that aren’t currently spoken for. And somewhere deep in their soul, however much they might rationalize it, they know it.
In Unscripted, Hannah arrives at a reckoning that’s genuinely painful to read. Looking back at how she treated Ben she sees it clearly for the first time:
“I made him my backup plan. I told myself I was being vulnerable. Actually, I was calculating. Strategizing. Using his support while evaluating if he could serve my purpose. I treated him as a spare, not as a person.”
The backup didn’t fail to matter. They mattered enormously. Which is precisely what makes the role so damaging—not just to the person kept in it, but to the person doing the keeping.
You can’t build a real relationship by exploiting someone else’s unconditional availability.
It’s a structure built for your safety, not for connection.
Reality check:
Is there someone in your life whose steady presence you rely on, while keeping them at just enough distance to preserve your options?
What would it mean to actually choose them, or honestly release them?
4. The Cost of Your ‘People as Assets’ Collection
Here’s the part the portfolio approach doesn’t advertise: it hollows you out.
Not dramatically, not all at once. It’s a slow erosion. You become so practiced at comparing this option to that one, managing impressions, maintaining appropriate levels of warmth without actual investment, that you gradually lose the ability to simply be with someone.
Presence becomes a skill you’ve stopped practicing.
The moment you’re in, you’re already calculating the next move.
There’s another cost that’s harder to name. When you relate to people primarily as assets, you start to lose access to your own genuine desires.
You stop asking, “What do I actually want?” and start asking, “What is the strategically optimal outcome here?”
The portfolio manager doesn’t fall for people.
They assess them.
And after a long enough time operating this way, you may find yourself genuinely unsure what you feel, because feeling, unmanaged and unoptimized, stopped feeling safe a long time ago.
In the novel, both Eddie and Hannah arrive at versions of this. Surrounded by people they’ve been collecting as trophies, hype men, safety nets, or strategic alliances, both feel profoundly, specifically alone. The portfolio is full. The heart is empty. Not because they’re bad people, but because the strategy that was supposed to protect them from loneliness has quietly become its source.
You can’t collect your way to connection.
You can only arrive there open-hearted.
Intimacy requires a kind of surrender that the portfolio approach is designed to prevent. It’s surrendering to the moment, to the person, to the unoptimized, un-hedged reality of two flawed humans choosing each other with no guaranteed return.
Reality check:
When was the last time you were completely present with someone? Not comparing them, not strategizing, not planning the next move, but simply being curious about what they were saying and who they were?
What did that feel like? How long ago was it?
5. The Unscripted Alternative: Choosing Presence Over Portfolio
The way out isn’t to find the perfect person. It’s to quit the curator role altogether.
This sounds simple and is genuinely difficult, because the portfolio approach is a habit wired into our nervous systems by years of optimization culture. The reflex to compare, to hedge, to keep options open doesn’t switch off just because you’ve named it.
But it can be interrupted. One interaction at a time.
The first interruption is replacing evaluation with curiosity. When you meet someone new, or show up to someone you already know, try setting the internal checklist down. Instead of running their profile against your criteria, ask a different kind of questions, inspired from the novel:
“What makes this person light up? What are they afraid of? What do they care about when no one’s watching?”
These questions can’t be answered by a pros and cons list. They can only be answered by paying attention, over time, without a predetermined verdict.
The second interruption is harder. It’s closing tabs. Mentally, or literally, letting go of the backup, stepping back from the low-heat maintenance of options you’re keeping alive for emotional insurance. This isn’t cruelty. It’s honesty. It frees both of you from a dynamic that was never going to become what either of you actually needed.
In Unscripted, there’s a quietly radical gesture: Ben’s “still here 4 u as promised.” A message sent with no pressure, no plan, no agenda. Just presence, offered without condition. He’s not managing a portfolio. He’s not hedging. He’s simply making himself available to be chosen or not by someone he sees as a whole person, not a role in his story.
Genuine availability is not passive.
It’s one of the bravest things a person can offer.
Reality check:
What would it look like, just for one day, to interact with someone without any hidden objective?
Not to impress them, secure them, or test them, but simply to find out who they actually are?
6. The Connection Cleanse
(Not rules. Just honest experiments.)
a. Audit your portfolio.
Take a genuinely honest look at your key connections, romantic and platonic.
- Which feel like trophies, pursued for what they prove about you?
- Which feel like backups, kept for security rather than chosen with full presence?
- Which feel like genuine connections, where you see and are seen by the whole human?
You don’t need to act on the audit immediately. Just see it clearly. The awareness itself begins to change something.
b. Close one tab.
Choose one connection you’ve been maintaining on low heat — a backup, a just-in-case, an ego-insurance policy.
- Gently, honestly, step back.
- Stop the low-level maintenance texts.
- Let it find its natural level.
The goal isn’t to be cold. It’s to stop using someone as emotional insurance—which frees them, and quietly frees you too.
c. Have one no-agenda interaction.
Choose one person and spend an hour genuinely focused on them. Not on what you’re getting from them, not on how you’re coming across, not on what the next step is.
Just: listening, observing, being curious about who this person actually is underneath the role they play in your story.
Notice what it feels like to put the rating checklist down.
7. Your Life Isn’t a Museum, and People Are Not Artifacts
That feeling of mentally categorizing everyone around you: ‘The Trophy,’ ‘The Backup,’ ‘The Option,’ isn’t a character flaw. It’s a sign that a strategy you adopted to protect yourself has started to feel more like a trap than a shelter.
It’s your own humanity telling you it’s tired of curation and hungry for something real.
Hannah’s journey in Unscripted isn’t ultimately about choosing the right person from her collection. It’s about the moment she recognizes she built a collection in the first place, and the quiet devastation of that recognition, followed by something that feels like relief.
The trophy loses its power when she finally sees the person behind it. The backup becomes a person when she stops needing him to be her safety net. The collector finds something like peace only when she stops collecting and starts showing up.
You are allowed to want connection without an agenda.
You are allowed to be interested in someone simply because they are genuinely interesting to you.
You are allowed to close the other tabs and give one story your full, undivided attention, even without knowing how it ends.
People are not assets to manage.
They are mysteries to meet.
Put down the portfolio. Step out of the gallery. And try, just for today, to have a conversation where the only goal is to listen and actually discover another human being.
It could completely change the quality of your relationships, don’t you think?