The Freedom to Be Unknown

There is someone I spoke to for years who, as it eventually turned out, had lied to me about almost everything about himself.

We had met online, where anonymity makes this both easier and harder to detect. By the time I discovered the extent of the deception, we had accumulated years of conversations. When I finally confronted him, I asked him one question that mattered more to me than the individual lies.

In all these years, had there really not been a single moment when he could have simply told me the truth?

He never answered.

We haven’t spoken since.

For a long time, that seemed like the end of the story. Then, the other night, I remembered something.

I was about to defend my doctoral thesis in my pre-defence and I was panicking. I called him.

He told me it was my work. My baby. Nobody in that room knew it better than I did. The questions my committee asked weren’t an interrogation; they were their curiosity about work I had spent years doing. It was my story to tell.

Something about the way he framed it settled me. I went into the room calmer. I answered the questions. My committee thought I did a good job.

Years later, I know that the person who said those words wasn’t the person I believed him to be. But the words still helped me. That is an uncomfortable thing to hold.

A person can deceive you and still have mattered to you. Something they gave you can remain valuable after you discover that the giver was not who you thought they were.

Perhaps that is why I found myself wondering about something larger: maybe we all need a small window out of our day-to-day lives — not somewhere to become someone else, but somewhere we don’t have to explain who we are at all.

The pressure to be known

We talk a lot now about loneliness. Alongside it, we talk about authenticity and vulnerability.

The prescription often seems straightforward: if we want genuine connection, we have to show up authentically. We have to allow ourselves to be seen. We have to be vulnerable.

I wonder if we have started confusing being authentic with being revealed.

I am essentially the same person online and offline. Duplicity makes me deeply uncomfortable. But that doesn’t mean I am an open book.

There are questions I won’t answer. Details I don’t share. Parts of my life that are not available simply because somebody asks. And there are thoughts and experiences that never really land anywhere outside me because I don’t think they need to.

None of that feels inauthentic. Privacy is not dishonesty. Neither is withholding.

There are parts of ourselves that belong to our interior lives, and perhaps they don’t require an audience at all. We may need a vocabulary for this that is more nuanced than our current language of authenticity and vulnerability.

Privacy says: this belongs to me.

A boundary says: you don’t get access to this.

Anonymity says: you don’t need to know who I am for us to have this conversation.

Deception says something different: I will give you information that causes you to believe I am someone I am not.

Those differences matter.

A dinner with a stranger

I once met a man for dinner who told me about his and his wife’s twenty-year struggle with IVF. He was married. He didn’t hide that.

He was looking for conversations outside his usual circle, and he explained why. We had a lovely dinner. We still occasionally message.

What stays with me about that encounter is not what he disclosed but what his disclosure allowed.

I got to choose.

I have met other married men who have told me, face to face, that they are married. With some, I have continued the interaction because nothing about it made me uncomfortable. With others, I have chosen not to.

Their honesty didn’t oblige me to stay. It gave me the freedom to leave.

Perhaps that is one of the things we miss when we talk about deception purely as a moral failure. A lie within a relationship doesn’t merely conceal something about the liar. It can change the information another person is using to decide whether they want to participate.

Truth preserves the other person’s agency.

That doesn’t mean telling them everything. The man I had dinner with didn’t owe me the contents of his marriage. He didn’t owe me twenty years of medical history. He could decide what remained private.

But he gave me enough truth to understand the nature of the interaction I was entering.

There is an enormous difference between saying, there are things about me I don’t want to tell you, and filling those spaces with things that aren’t true. One is a boundary. The other writes somebody else into a story without letting them know it is fiction.

Perhaps we don’t always need deeper connection

The dinner also made me wonder whether we misunderstand some forms of loneliness.

Twenty years of IVF is not merely a medical history. Experiences accumulate identities around us. Within families, marriages, friendships and workplaces, people know our histories. They know what has happened to us. They know what things mean.

Sometimes that is the great comfort of intimacy. Sometimes it may also be exhausting.

Perhaps there are moments when what we need is someone who doesn’t already know what everything means — someone who doesn’t carry our biography into the conversation, who doesn’t need us to be the spouse, parent, child, scientist, caregiver, successful one, struggling one, dependable one, or difficult one.

Just a person sitting across a table from another person.

We tend to imagine the answer to loneliness as more intimacy. Deeper friendships. Greater vulnerability. More disclosure. But perhaps sometimes what we need is connection with less weight on it.

A dinner. A conversation. The person you see regularly on your morning walk, a neighbour you talk to over a wall, a shopkeeper who knows what you buy but nothing about your marriage, someone you encounter online who knows how you think but not where you live.

These relationships may never become friendships. They may last twenty minutes or twenty years. They don’t have to become more to have mattered.

Perhaps we need to recover the value of being lightly known.

A window, not a mask

The internet should have been extraordinarily good at this. It gave us the possibility of encountering another mind before encountering the social identities attached to it.

Profession. Family. Status. Age. Reputation. Geography. The accumulated story other people carry about who we are.

For a little while, two people could simply talk. There is freedom in that.

And perhaps that was part of what existed in the relationship I eventually walked away from.

Before my thesis pre-defence, I didn’t need to be the competent doctoral researcher who had spent years doing the work. I could simply be frightened.

He could say, Nobody knows this better than you — and for those few minutes, that was enough.

Maybe he needed that window too.

I can understand that possibility now in a way I couldn’t when I first discovered his lies. Perhaps there were things about his ordinary life he wanted to put down. Perhaps he wanted somewhere he wasn’t carrying whatever identities and expectations followed him elsewhere.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that he didn’t need to invent another person in order to have that space with me. He could have remained unknown. That is what makes the deception difficult to excuse.

He could have said: I don’t want to tell you my name. I don’t want to tell you where I live. I don’t want to talk about my circumstances.

I might have accepted those terms. I might not have.

But I would have been able to choose.

Anonymity could have given him a window. Instead, deception turned it into a mask.

How much do we need to know?

Perhaps relationships have different capacities for the unknown. A conversation between strangers can comfortably contain enormous gaps; a friendship may contain fewer; an intimate relationship fewer still. Not because closeness gives us ownership over another person’s private life — it doesn’t — but because as trust, attachment and reliance accumulate, what we don’t know can begin to affect our understanding of the relationship itself.

There must be room between radical disclosure and deception: room for privacy, for boundaries, for the things we choose never to tell anyone, and room to encounter another person without demanding their résumé and their entire emotional architecture before deciding whether the conversation is worth having.

I still don’t know who the man I spoke to for all those years really was. But I know who I was on the day I called him before my pre-defence: I was frightened, and someone reminded me that I knew my own work better than anyone in the room — that the story was mine to tell.

And I believed him.

The strange thing is that I still do.

Perhaps something real can pass between two people even when they do not fully know one another. The question isn’t whether we must reveal ourselves completely before that can happen — it is whether we can allow ourselves to remain partly unknown without becoming untrue, and whether, in doing so, we leave the person across from us free to choose whether they want to meet us there.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.