I Love Dick is a personal memoir of Chris Kraus. During the period of her life in question, she was looking for an exterior solution to her internal struggles of self-worth and acceptance. When she meets Dick, she instantly projects all of her repressed feelings and expectations upon him, inventing the perfect partner. She becomes consumed with her sexual fantasies for Dick, even convincing her husband, Sylvere, to participate in writing letters to Dick in order to satisfy her and preserve their marriage. When they reach out to Dick, he is unresponsive and refuses to have anything to do with them. It's a crushing blow to Chris, but she writes this memoir to cement the experience in her memory.
Chris projects her fantasies onto Dick, creating a fictional representation of him in her mind, but the truth is she doesn't know anything about him. To her, Dick is the solution to all of her woes. He fulfills her real fantasy which is to be spared the pain of a divorce. Rather than tell Sylvere exactly how she feels and which parts of herself she's not happy about and which parts of him she's frustrated by, she internalizes these feelings, until finally she has to get rid of them. Unable to bear the weight of this responsibility to her husband and her own mental healthy any longer, Chris chances to use the next stranger she sees as an object onto which she can project her delusion of victimhood.
For his part, Dick barely knows the couple. Although he meets Chris, he really didn't think about her again until she and Sylvere mail their letters. Even then it has been some time since he met her before receiving the letters. He is unreceptive and understandably hostile to Chris' advances. He feels as if he's being stalked and takes the necessary steps to protect himself from emotional or physical harm from this couple which have demonstrated a certain degree of delusion in their approach to him.
