A few days ago, someone who has known me for a very long time told me that I am a very nice human being, but also a remarkably naive one. I laughed when he said it, partly because I thought he was being unfair and partly because I suspected there was some truth in it. Then one day, during one of our long conversations, I finally asked him what he meant.
His answer was simple. He said that I have a habit of pretending that I do not care. Whenever something affects me, I try to convince myself that it does not. I try to look strong, detached and nonchalant, as though refusing to acknowledge that something matters to me will somehow make it matter less.
The irritating thing about being understood correctly is that there is very little room left for denial. Because he was right. I do care. I give a lot of fucks about a lot of things. I have simply become very good at convincing myself that I do not. Sometimes I call it being practical, sometimes I call it emotional maturity, and sometimes I tell myself that I am simply not the kind of person who gets affected by things. Perhaps it is just a more sophisticated way of protecting myself from admitting that I am affected.
What makes his observation particularly unsettling is that he is one of the few people who could have made it. We have been friends for almost a decade, although for most of those years there was nothing particularly romantic about our friendship. We were simply friends. We lived our separate lives, spoke when we spoke and returned to each other without needing explanations for the distance.
Then, over the last few months, something changed. We started talking more. Not every day, and not with the kind of constant communication that people usually associate with intimacy, but whenever we spoke, our conversations seemed to carry an unusual amount of weight. We could begin with something completely ridiculous and somehow end up discussing our lives, our fears, our relationships, our flaws and the things we rarely say aloud.
We also started saying increasingly unhinged things to each other. The strange part was that neither of us ever regretted them. Sometimes, after one of those conversations, one of us would ask the other, “Did you regret what we talked about last time?” The answer was never yes. There was something reassuring about that. We could say something frighteningly honest and still return to the conversation later without pretending that it had not happened. There was no embarrassment after vulnerability and no need to take back what had already been said.
Then one day, I told him something that I had been thinking about. I told him that I was frightened by the possibility of one of us eventually finding someone else. A partner. A wife. A husband. Someone who would become the person with whom the other built a life. I was not talking about jealousy exactly. I was talking about us. What would happen to this friendship when one of us had another person who came first?
Would we still speak with the same honesty? Would we still have these conversations? Would we still be able to tell each other the things we tell each other now? Would another person understand what this friendship meant, or would our lives inevitably become too full of other commitments, other loyalties and other kinds of intimacy? More simply, I was asking him something I was almost afraid to hear the answer to: if you find someone else, what happens to me?
And then he told me that he had wondered about exactly the same thing. That frightened me more than I expected. Because it is one thing to realise that someone matters to you. It is another thing to discover that you may matter to them in precisely the same frightening way.
Since then, our friendship has changed. Not necessarily because we speak more, but because we are now aware of something that did not have a name before. There is a kind of knowledge between us that cannot be undone simply because we have decided not to act on it.
I really like him. I have wanted a future with him. I have imagined what it would be like if this friendship became a relationship, if the person I have known for almost a decade became the person with whom I built a life. And yet, for reasons that we both understand, we cannot seem to imagine that future.
This is where my confusion about relationships begins. I look around me and see people who are technically together but seem unable to communicate with one another. I see people who have stayed for years because familiarity has become safer than starting again. I see people who give far more than they receive, people who remain trapped in cycles of insecurity and conflict, and people who stay in marriages because leaving feels more frightening than remaining unhappy. I have also seen people leave and become happier, and others leave and regret it. I have seen relationships survive because of children and relationships end because two people finally accepted that staying together was no longer good for either of them. The more I see, the less convinced I am that being together is, by itself, evidence that something is working.
Perhaps that is why this situation frightens me so much. Because I know this person. I know his flaws. He knows mine. We have enough differences of opinion to know that we are not simply two people who agree about everything. But when we disagree, we ask questions. I ask him why he thinks the way he does. I ask why he believes we cannot meet somewhere in the middle. He explains himself, and even when I do not agree, I almost always understand. There is something extraordinarily intimate about that kind of understanding.
It does not mean that we are perfect for each other. It does not even prove that we would make good partners. In fact, perhaps that is the terrifying part. What if we are confusing a decade of friendship with romantic compatibility? What if the very things that make us wonderful friends would become unbearable once we were partners? What if we finally decided to try and discovered that we had been protecting something beautiful by refusing to change it? And what if the opposite is true? What if we are frightened of changing the friendship because we already know how much it means to us, and in doing so, we are walking away from something that could have become extraordinary? There is no answer that makes either possibility less frightening.
I used to think I wanted a fairly traditional relationship and a fairly traditional marriage. I thought that, eventually, I would meet someone, build a life with him and understand what my place in that life was supposed to be. Growing older has made that fantasy much less simple. I have begun to realise that I am not particularly interested in merely having a relationship. I want to be known inside one. I want someone who knows my patterns, not just my preferences. Someone who can recognise when I am pretending not to care. Someone who knows when I am being defensive, when I am being unreasonable and when I am simply frightened. Someone who can ask me a question that forces me to confront something about myself that I have been avoiding.
More than anything, I think I want someone to know me so well that, sometimes, I do not have to know myself.
And perhaps that is the most beautiful and frightening thing I have ever wanted from another person. Because what happens when the person who knows you that well leaves? What happens when the person who can see through your defences is no longer there to see through them? And what happens if you never find that kind of understanding again?
Maybe that is what frightens me about the future. I am not necessarily frightened of being alone. I am frightened of being with someone and still being alone in all the ways that actually matter. I am frightened of having a relationship that looks complete from the outside but feels incomplete from within. I am frightened of mistaking familiarity for happiness, stability for compatibility, or longevity for love. I am frightened of staying because leaving is difficult, and I am equally frightened of leaving something good because I was too afraid to trust it. Perhaps this is what relationships really ask of us: not whether we can find someone who loves us, but whether we can find someone with whom we can remain honest about who we are.
I still do not know what he and I are supposed to do with what we have discovered. Maybe we are simply two friends who became important to each other at the wrong time. Maybe we are two people who could have built something beautiful but cannot build it now. Maybe we are making a mistake by refusing to find out. Or maybe the friendship is the thing we will be grateful we protected years from now.
I do not know. What I do know is that I can no longer pretend that it does not matter to me.
For years, I thought self-awareness meant knowing myself well enough to understand my own feelings. Now I am beginning to think there is another kind of self-awareness, one that arrives through another person: the moment someone sees a pattern in you that you have spent years refusing to see.
He knew that I cared before I admitted that I cared.
And perhaps that is what intimacy really is. It is not finding someone who knows everything about you. It is finding someone who notices the things you have not yet learned to notice about yourself, and trusting them enough to let them tell you the truth. Maybe that is what we are all looking for when we enter relationships. Not perfection. Not constant agreement. Not even certainty that the person will stay. Maybe we are looking for someone who can look at the version of ourselves we present to the world, see through it completely, and still choose to sit beside us.
The frightening part is that I think I have already found someone who can do that. I just do not know whether I am going to get to keep him. And for the first time, I cannot even pretend that it does not matter.
