Hi there,

I’ve been thinking about something strange that can happen in families and relationships: you can know someone incredibly well and still not feel very known by them.

I recently spent a lot of time with someone I love, and I kept noticing all these tiny things I knew about him. The particular things he does with his hands, the stories he tells, the little habits that have been exactly the same since I was a child. There was something sweet about it. There is a kind of intimacy in knowing another human being that well.

But afterward, I found myself sitting with the other side of it. How much does this person actually know me? Not the facts about me, not where I live or what I do for work or what is happening in my life. I mean me. What overwhelms me. What I need when I’m tired. What makes me retreat. What makes me light up. What happens inside me when I say no. What it costs me when I don’t.

And I started thinking about how easily we can mistake knowing someone for being in a reciprocal relationship with them.

For some of us, knowing other people became a survival skill very early. We learned the sound of a parent coming down the hallway. We knew whether a sigh meant irritation or exhaustion. We could tell from the way someone put down a glass whether it was a good time to ask for something.

Later, that ability may look like empathy. And often it is empathy. But sometimes it is also vigilance.

We become exquisitely attuned to the people around us. We know what they like, anticipate what they need, remember what bothers them, and adjust before they ever have to ask. Because we are so good at relationship, we may not immediately notice that much of the relationship is traveling in one direction.

This is where boundaries get interesting to me.

A boundary is not only “Please don’t do that,” or “I’m not available.” Sometimes a boundary is the moment we stop automatically organizing ourselves around another person. We say what restaurant we want to go to. We admit that we’re tired. We don’t immediately smooth over someone’s disappointment. We say, “Actually, that doesn’t work for me.”

And suddenly the relationship has to accommodate information it may not have had to accommodate before: there are two people here.

That can feel surprisingly destabilizing. If you have spent years being the person who adapts, your needs may genuinely surprise people. They may experience your boundary as a change in the relationship because, in a sense, it is. You are changing the terms under which closeness has historically been maintained.

This is one reason I think boundary work is so much deeper than learning how to say no. The question isn’t only, “Can I state my boundary?” It is also: Can I tolerate being more visible? Can I let someone discover that I am different from who they imagined me to be? Can I survive their surprise, disappointment, confusion, or irritation without immediately disappearing again?

And perhaps most painfully, can I allow myself to see where someone I love may simply not have the capacity to know me in the way I wish they could?

That last one is not really a boundary skill. It is grief.

There are relationships in which becoming more visible creates more intimacy. Someone learns us. They adjust. They become curious. The relationship gets bigger because there is finally room for more of who we are.

And there are relationships where we may have to learn to love someone without continuing to wait for a kind of seeing they cannot offer.

I don’t think the answer is always distance. Sometimes there can be tremendous sweetness in a relationship that is also limited. But there is something profoundly different about enjoying what a relationship is once we stop requiring ourselves to disappear inside it.

That is something I’m sitting with this week.

I’d love to hear what it brings up for you. Hit reply and tell me: Where in your life do you know someone deeply, but wonder whether they really know you?

Warmly,
Tanya