The people who know us

There are people who will tell you, with absolute certainty, what their dog is thinking. He doesn’t like men in hats. She’s embarrassed. He knows we’re going away. She prefers the blue blanket. The dog, meanwhile, has offered no verbal confirmation whatsoever. We do something similar with people. Oh, she’ll never leave Auckland. He wouldn’t enjoy that. She’s always been ambitious. He doesn’t talk about feelings. That’s just who she is. We gather enough evidence over enough years and eventually stop noticing that somewhere along the way, knowing someone can quietly become deciding who they are. 

“I know you.” Three little words that can feel wonderfully intimate. Or surprisingly claustrophobic. I discovered something about that distinction when my marriage to my children’s father ended. Some people who had known me for years were bewildered. It’s not like you. They meant it kindly. They knew me. They knew how much family mattered to me, and what I was doing didn’t fit their understanding of who I was. Except, of course, they weren’t in the relationship. They knew that I wanted a family. They couldn’t possibly know from the outside what I wanted inside one, or what I had begun to understand about the difference between having a life alongside someone and creating a genuinely shared one. I was changing too. That is the inconvenient thing about knowing human beings: we keep becoming.

Who gets to hear you say: This is going to sound ridiculous, but… I haven’t told anyone this yet… I don’t even know whether I mean this, but… Can I say something awful? I’m not sure I want the life I thought I wanted. There is something about those sentences. They are rarely declarations. More often, they are small requests for permission to be raw and unedited. What follows may not be sensible, consistent, flattering or even true by tomorrow. We are allowing someone to meet a thought at almost the same time we are meeting it ourselves.

Perhaps that is one of the places intimacy begins: who gets to know the unedited you? Or, who do you open your kimono to? And before your mind wanders too far into the gutter, being naked is metaphorical. Although, depending on the relationship, presumably that can be arranged. Who gets the version of you before you have made yourself coherent, reasonable or ready for public consumption?

We use the word intimacy as though its meaning is obvious. We have intimate partners, intimate conversations, intimate knowledge. We associate it particularly with romantic and sexual relationships, perhaps because physical closeness is so easily mistaken for emotional closeness. Yet relationship status tells us remarkably little about intimacy. We can share a bed with someone who barely knows us, while a conversation with a friend over coffee can go somewhere we have never been with the person we have lived beside for twenty years. We can be extraordinarily familiar with someone without being particularly intimate with them.

Think about the relationships in your own life. Who knows the professional or competent-adult version of you? Who knows the slightly outrageous one? The frightened one? Who gets the phone call before you have decided what you are going to do? Who, occasionally, knows where the bodies are buried? 

Someone at work may have known you for fifteen years but have almost no access to your inner world. A friend you met much later may be able to tell from the way you say hello that something is wrong. An old friend may know exactly where you came from but surprisingly little about who you are becoming. Another may somehow have kept pace with every version.

We edit ourselves differently in different relationships, and mostly that is entirely appropriate. Privacy is not dishonesty. Boundaries matter. The person beside us at a conference does not need our complete psychological history because they asked how our flight was. TMI is real. The more interesting question is whether there is anyone with whom we don’t have to wait for the edited version. And what makes that possible?

Years ago, when I wrote Real Me Better We, I was preoccupied with authenticity. I had become fascinated by the masks we wear and the roles we learn to perform, sometimes so successfully that we can lose sight of where the performance ends and the person begins. My proposition was relatively simple: if we want to create a better “we”, we have to be willing to first find, then bring more of the “real me” into relationship. 

I still believe that. But I wonder now whether I made the Real Me sound rather more finished than any of us actually are. Perhaps there is no definitive edition. My coachees and I sometimes joke about moving from version 1.0 to 2.0. The joke contains something serious: the person being revealed is still becoming. 

I have been reminded of this recently through poetry. Some of the poems I have published in Perfectly Imperfect were written from places far less polished than the finished book that now contains them. Over coffee, a friend asked why I would expose something so personal. It was a good question, because exposure and intimacy can look remarkably similar from the outside. They are not the same thing. A stranger can read something extraordinarily personal that I have written without knowing me intimately at all. Meanwhile, someone sitting across a kitchen table may know nothing conventionally sensational about me and still be invited into an unfinished thought I have barely admitted to myself.

Vulnerability is not simply about how much we reveal. Sometimes it is about allowing ourselves to be encountered before we know exactly what we are revealing. Vulnerability creates access. I can discover something privately about myself, but the moment I say it to you, that emerging part of me exists between us. You now have access to something I may not yet fully understand myself. What happens in that space between disclosure and response is part of what makes intimacy possible.

It changes my understanding of Better We too. A better “we” is not necessarily two fully formed, authentic human beings who finally find each other and live happily ever after. At this stage of my life, I am much more interested in whether two people can create a relationship in which neither is required to stop becoming in order to remain known.

If the person being known keeps changing, time introduces an interesting complication. We tend to treat relationship tenure as evidence of intimacy: I’ve known him since university. We’ve been friends since we were twelve. We’ve been married thirty-eight years. Sometimes it is. Time can give another person extraordinary access to our history. Someone remembers the ridiculous haircut, the first job, the tiny flat, the person you loved before you knew what love might require of you. They hold parts of your history outside your own memory. But history and inner knowing are not the same thing.

There is an old saying that familiarity breeds contempt. I’m not sure contempt is inevitable, but familiarity can certainly breed assumption. We stop asking because we think we know the answer. You’ve never wanted that. That’s not like you. You hate travelling. But you love your job. Knowing someone for forty years does not necessarily mean knowing who they are now. The danger may not be that we know someone too well, but that we become too certain that what we know is still true. I know you deeply enough not to assume I’ve finished knowing you.

The unfinishedness is the intimacy

We have sayings designed to reassure us that people don’t really change. A leopard doesn’t change its spots. Perhaps not. But humans are not leopards, and midlife would be considerably simpler if we were. Nature itself seems remarkably uninterested in staying still. Living things grow, adapt, shed, regenerate and decay. Yet somewhere along the way, we developed the peculiar expectation that adult human beings should arrive at a reasonably stable version of themselves and remain recognisable thereafter.

Midlife can make a spectacular mess of that arrangement. Bodies change. Children grow up. Parents age and die. Careers peak, end or stop meaning what they once did. Things we tolerated at thirty-five can become strangely intolerable at fifty-five. Things we once dismissed can become urgent. Time itself starts to feel different once we have lived enough of it to understand what twenty years actually feels like.

We laugh at the clichés of the midlife crisis: the Porsche, the affair, the dramatic reinvention. But perhaps we’ve mistaken some of the props for the plot. Heated seats will not scratch an existential itch. They merely keep the itch warm. The harder question is what the itch is asking for. Maybe freedom or novelty. Maybe meaning or desire. Maybe to be known again. Maybe simply to become. And, if we’re lucky, to become and still belong. Perhaps the much-mocked midlife crisis sometimes contains a perfectly reasonable question: Is this how I want to spend what remains? And that question inevitably enters our intimate relationships.

Later-life divorce has become common enough to acquire its own colour: grey divorce. There are countless reasons relationships end and equally countless reasons long relationships deepen and flourish, so it would be foolish to reduce either to a single explanation. But grey divorce does challenge an assumption worth examining: longevity and intimacy are not the same thing.

Two people can accumulate an enormous amount together: a home, children, investments, holidays, friends, rituals, forty Christmases and seventeen arguments about the correct way to stack a dishwasher. They can share responsibilities, geography, memories and decades. They can become exceptionally good at operating a life together while becoming increasingly poor at discovering one another.

Shared does not necessarily mean known. Time does not necessarily mean inner access. A shared history, even a shared home, is not necessarily a shared interior life. 

For me, that distinction matters. I don’t want simply to have a life alongside someone. I want a shared life. Not access to every thought or every private corner. Intimacy is not surveillance. But access to the person actually living there: the changing one, the contradictory one, the one who occasionally says, I don’t even know whether I mean this, but…

Perhaps the test of a long relationship is not simply how much two people have accumulated together, but whether they remain places in which each other’s becoming can occur. When did you last discover something about the person you think you know best? What do they want now that they did not want ten years ago? What part of themselves is emerging for which they do not yet have language? Can they surprise you without threatening your understanding of them?

Close encounters of the familiar kind

This question is not only for couples. Several women I know at midlife are single, some by circumstance and some by deliberate choice. They have friendships, families, work, homes, communities and lives they value. Some would welcome partnership. Others look at the proposition and conclude, with varying degrees of diplomacy, naw, too much work. Perhaps that deserves more curiosity than our culture sometimes gives it. When a person no longer needs a relationship to organise the practical architecture of their life, changing the marital-status box on a form is not much of a value proposition. The question becomes: what would a relationship need to add to a life I am already actively becoming inside?

For me, the questions are increasingly simple. Can we be more alive together? Can I think unfinished thoughts with you? Can you encounter who I am becoming without continually returning me to who I have been? Can I offer you the same freedom? Can we challenge one another without trying to author one another? Can we create something between us that neither of us could create alone? Tick those and I’m interested. That, perhaps, is Better We grown up. Not jaded by what has or has not worked before, but clearer about the difference between having a relationship and creating one that adds something meaningful to two already living lives.

Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity has interested me for years partly because of the largeness with which he approaches intimacy. It is not simply romantic or sexual, but belongs to the broader human possibility of genuinely encountering another person: conversation and curiosity allowing us to see both another human being and sometimes ourselves differently. Perhaps genuine intimacy asks us to approach even someone familiar with something of that curiosity. The adventure is not necessarily in finding someone new. It may be in refusing to assume that someone familiar has nothing new left to discover.

Genuine encounters do not necessarily require extraordinary disclosures. Some of the simplest exchanges can feel profoundly intimate: Really? I didn’t know that. What do you think it means? You don’t have to know yet. There is something wonderfully generous in that last sentence. You don’t have to know yet. You are allowed to be unfinished here.

Tell me anyway

There are, as it happens, things more comforting than heated seats. To be listened to, heard and intimately held, not necessarily by arms, but by someone’s attention. To hand another person an unfinished piece of yourself and discover that they are interested rather than alarmed. To have someone interested in the person you are becoming, not merely familiar with the person you have been.

Perhaps that is worth looking for in our own relationships. Who has access to our inner world? Who gets the polished answer and who gets the thinking-out-loud version? Who knows our history but not our present? And where have we become so familiar with someone else that we have quietly stopped discovering them?

The harder half of the inquiry is: Who experiences that kind of intimacy with us? When someone we love says, I don’t even know whether I mean this, but…, do we listen? Or do we reach for the red pen—reassuring, correcting, interpreting, reminding them who they are and returning them safely to the version we already understand?

Maybe a genuinely shared life asks something much more interesting of us than longevity. It may ask us to keep encountering one another: unfinished, changing and occasionally surprising. Not to finally know one another, but to keep wanting to. 

I know you. Tell me anyway.

Dr Jordan Marijana Alexander is a writer, executive advisor and human systems strategist exploring how identity, place, culture and living systems shape participation in the modern world. She works alongside leaders, boards and organisations navigating complex questions of leadership, change and participation, and is the co-founder of RelateAble.Global. If this article has raised questions, sparked reflection or highlighted a decision you’re carrying, you’re invited to book a confidential conversation. You can follow DrJMA on LinkedIn and Engenesis for ongoing essays, reflections and research exploring leadership, identity, belonging and participation.