Of course, there are anomalies, and we're being rather cynical here, but as much as your mobile device has aided your quest for love (in that you have a pool of eligible men and women in your pocket at all times) it's also complicated things an awful lot.The ways in which social media and mobiles have impacted our love lives are myriad, complex and, well, too broad to discuss in one place. According to The Telegraph , Tinder alone had 50million active users in 2014. One inescapable side-effect of mobile love has been the increasing frequency and rapidity at which near-strangers suddenly enter our peripheral vision and penetrate our thoughts.Apps like Tinder, Happn and Bumble, and even bog standard social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, mean we have access to the new demi-stranger's every move. The risks attached to viewing someone from a distance is that things can become blurred; it's easy to imagine a white picket fence and a few kids in the background if you squint, maybe a hot sex-filled holiday in the middle distance if you tilt your head, and almost certainly a drink or three in near sight.

Kimberley Wilson, Chartered Counselling Psychologist refers to this as "projection". "The rise of the internet presents a very new challenge for the mind. While the interface – your phone or laptop – is physical [i.e. it can be touched] the internet and everything in it is intangible and in some senses, dream-like. In this way the internet presents a perfect screen for projection."Projection is a very early defence mechanism that has its roots in an infant’s need to keep ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in clear and separate categories until, with maturity, he/she comes to understand that these things often overlap into shades of grey. Projection is the unconscious process of attributing to others characteristics or traits that actually relate to the self rather than the other person. A simple example of this is when an unfaithful person in a relationship begins to suspect their partner of cheating, without any evidence. In this scenario they are projecting their own guilty feelings onto their innocent partner."Essentially, we can easily imbue people we discern as attractive with other qualities we might admire, just as we do with characters in books and films; beyond sexual attraction, it's easy to romanticise. You can see how one might add a lust for travel excitement and spontaneity to a simple holiday picture. As Kimbereley puts it: "Typically the less that we know about another person, the more we are able to project on them, because there is less evidence or reality to interfere with the story we are creating in our own minds."Maybe they've clicked attending on an event that would suggest a shared love of the same music. Of course, at a very sanitised level this is merely day-dreaming, a pastime lots of us indulge in when we meet someone who takes our fancy.