She said she understood me, and I felt lonelier than ever.
We’d been talking for hours, the way you do in the early days of a relationship when everything still feels significant. I’d told her things I rarely shared. And when she said those words, “I understand you,” I felt something inside me recoil.
It’s strange, isn’t it? We spend so much of our lives wanting to be understood. We craft our stories, arrange our experiences into narratives that make sense, hoping someone will finally see us clearly. And then, when they claim to, we feel suddenly trapped.
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote about the violence of comprehension. To comprehend something is to grasp it, to contain it, to reduce it to what we already know. When someone says they understand you, they’re saying you fit into categories they recognise.
But you don’t want to fit. Not completely. Some part of you wants to remain unknowable, mysterious even to yourself.
I think what we actually want isn’t to be understood but to be witnessed. To have someone sit with our strangeness without trying to explain it away. To be seen in our contradictions without being asked to resolve them.
My grandmother had a phrase for this. She’d say some people need to be felt, not figured out. She was talking about my grandfather, who rarely said what he meant and often meant things he couldn’t say. They were married fifty-three years.
There’s an intimacy in admitting you don’t fully understand someone. It means you’re still paying attention, still discovering, still surprised. The relationship remains alive because it remains, in some essential way, unknown.
I’ve noticed that the people who claim to understand me most completely are often the ones who know me least. They’ve mistaken a few conversations for complete knowledge. They’ve drawn a map of me and stopped exploring.
The people who actually love me well? They’re the ones who keep asking questions. Who remain curious about my inconsistencies. Who don’t rush to explain me to myself.
Perhaps the greatest gift we can give each other isn’t understanding but attention. Not the comfort of being known, but the excitement of continuing to be discovered.
I never saw that woman again. But I think about what I should have said when she claimed to understand me. Something like: “I hope you never do. I hope I remain strange enough to keep you interested.”