Ask almost anybody how they are and they will say they are fine. Everybody knows this, and we all know it so completely that the question has stopped being a question at all. It has become a kind of greeting, like a hand raised across a street. And yet it keeps being asked and keeps being answered, and somewhere underneath the whole exchange both people understand that nothing has been said.
It is easy to take this for politeness, or for the reasonable preference not to burden strangers with our weather. But watch it more closely, in people who know each other very well, in rooms where there is time and there is safety and there is nobody to be burdened. They still say they are fine. Something other than politeness is going on.
It is painful to see how few people ever show a vulnerable side. They act strong and cheerful while they are suffering, they do it with real skill, and very often the people closest to them have no idea at all. Why? Not because they are ashamed of suffering, though some are. It seems to be something more particular than that, and more painful.
What is actually being protected
Here is what it appears to be. People do not hide their difficulty because they fear being seen with it. They hide it because they fear showing it and then being met with nothing. To open yourself to somebody and receive a shrug, or a joke, or a quick change of subject, is far worse than never having opened at all. So the risk gets calculated, usually without anybody knowing they are calculating anything, and fine is decided to be the safer word.
The expectation is the dangerous part. To show somebody that you are struggling is to have quietly asked them for something, even if it is never said and would be denied if asked. And if they do not give it, or do not notice that they were asked, then you are left holding both the original difficulty and a fresh disappointment on top of it. Two hurts instead of one. Anybody who has had that happen once will think very carefully before offering the opening a second time.
So a face develops, and it gets good, and the getting good is gradual enough that nobody notices it happening. Then something occurs which nobody plans for, which is that the face becomes so convincing that even the people who love them start to believe it. And then they are genuinely alone, and they did it themselves, carefully, out of nothing worse than self-protection.
The two kinds of hiding
The hiding takes at least two forms, and from outside they look identical. Some people hide because of something that happened early, some disappointment at an age small enough to conclude from it that closeness is not safe. They are not cold. They simply learnt a rule and never revisited it, and the rule is doing a job it stopped needing to do decades ago. Their guardedness is old, and it is not really about anybody currently in their life.
Others hide because their position requires it. They have become the one everybody comes to, the one who holds things together, the one whose steadiness the whole arrangement rests upon. For that person, showing difficulty is not merely personally risky, it threatens a structure that other people depend on. So they hold it, and everybody around them goes on drawing from that steadiness, and nobody thinks to ask whether the well has anything left in it.
Most of us have been both at different times. In both cases the thing that keeps somebody safe is exactly the thing that keeps them unreached. That is not an irony, it is simply how a defence works, and a defence cannot be selective about what it keeps out.
The other side of it
There is another side, and it is usually discussed only from the position of the person hiding. When somebody does show a vulnerable side and then immediately makes a joke about it, or laughs it off, or says it is nothing, the other person feels disappointed. That disappointment is worth looking at honestly, because what exactly is it about? They were protecting themselves, and they had every reason to.
But something has been lost in the moment, and what is lost is a rare opportunity for two people to be in the same room as themselves rather than as their arrangements. Those opportunities are not frequent. Most days there is not one. And when one comes and gets covered over quickly with a laugh, something that could have happened does not happen, and neither person will ever know what it was.
There is no recommendation to make here, and recommendations about this should be distrusted, because the fear people are protecting themselves from is a real fear and not a foolish one. What can be observed is that the times anybody said the true thing were almost never the times they had decided in advance to be honest. They were accidents, moments when somebody was too tired to run the usual machinery, and something got out. And they turn out far better than anybody spent years assuming they would.
