Definition
Idealization is the perceptual distortion of seeing another person as flawless — exceptional, complete, free of the ordinary faults everyone has. It is the heightened state of early attraction, when a person seems less like an individual and more like an embodiment of one's hopes.
Greene treats idealization as the raw material of seduction. A seducer does not so much earn the idealized image as create the conditions for the target to construct it, then takes care not to puncture it.
Why it matters
How it works
Idealization runs on incomplete information. When a person is partly unknown — mysterious, novel, slightly unavailable — the mind fills the unknown with its own material, and it tends to fill it favorably. The seducer aids this by staying vague, controlling the setting, and avoiding the mundane disclosures that would humanize them. The result is an image more wish than person. It feels intoxicating precisely because it reflects the perceiver's desires back at them. The corrective is information: ordinary time, ordinary contexts, honest conversation. The more a person is actually known, the harder they are to idealize.