This series, using absurdism and subversion, is drawn from my personal experience of navigating a fluid identity throughout a long-term partnership with my husband, Jordan, and his portrait. Historically, portraits of men feature their identity and occupation or societal role at the forefront; contrarily, women are frequently transformed into motifs, allegories, and symbols, and their roles subsumed by their use as “inspiration.” The works speculate and critique the canonical art history into a critique of current media culture, which pushes blind acceptance of constructed boxes of desire, offering caricatures of love, gender, and sexuality. Hybrid portraits announce the blurred lines between sense of self and our constructed identities in relation to our partner, and question the persistent belief that a glimpse contains an uncontaminated truth or that a portrait captures the essence of a person. I use exaggeration to suggest our collective buy-in to romantic narratives pushed upon us, and highlight the collective socialization of desire by asking “what are the risks of desire being rooted in speculation and projection?”