Important Question That Absolutely Doesn’t Matter… But Why Is There Only ONE Man on This M/M Cover? (Asking for My Sanity)

Does anyone else get mildly stressed trying to guess which guy is on the cover of an M/M romance when there's only one guy?

Many M/M romance books have one lone dude on the cover—looking broody, mysterious, or like he’s about to launch his own cologne—and every time I’m like:

“Okay sir… but WHICH main character are you supposed to be?”

Maybe it's a unique problem for me because I have aphantasia (which basically means my brain cannot turn written descriptions into actual mental images), I really lean on the cover to tell me who’s who. So when a book gives me nothing but One Random Man™, I just pick an MC for him to be and pray I didn’t accidentally cast the grumpy, tattooed mechanic as the soft-spoken cinnamon-roll librarian. By chapter 10 I’m way too emotionally committed to switch mental faces, so the cover guy becomes the character… even if he’s wildly wrong.

And maybe I’m completely overthinking this (shockingly on-brand for me), while everyone else just reads happily and I’m over here conducting full-blown cover-art forensic analysis.

So tell me:

• Do you also wonder which MC is on the cover—real person or illustrated—and does it bug you? I personally prefer seeing both characters.

-Do you also wonder these things, or am I alone in my overthinking spiral?

-What do you think is the reasoning behind an author choosing to put just one character on the cover instead of both?