🐇 HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO KNOW SOMEONE?

Are people revealing themselves over time—or are circumstances simply giving us opportunities to see parts of them that were always there?

Scenario: You meet someone. Maybe you like them immediately, so you spend time together talking, laughing, discovering things you have in common. Eventually you begin to think you know this person, but do you?

Do you really?

Here's the uncomfortable thing about human beings: We don't meet the whole person. We meet whatever part of them happens to be visible under the circumstances in which we encounter them, and then our brains do something rather extraordinary. We fill in the rest with our own assumptions. I covered that more in the Halo Effect.  But for now I'll just drop that there. 

🧠 The first version of someone we meet.

When we first meet somebody, we're working with very limited information.We don't  know how they behave when they're exhausted, frightened,  jealous, bored, pissed off, financially stressed, rejected, told "no" to a request, or this one....given power.  I know, right? That one gives me shivers a little bit because there's a saying: "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Here's the thing:

• We don't know how they behave when nobody is watching.

• We don't know how they treat people who can't do anything for them.

• We don't know how they respond when they don't get what they want.

• We certainly don't know how they'll behave five years from now.

Yet somehow, our brains begin constructing a working model almost immediately because we think someone is funny, generous, safe, ambitious, trustworthy, and so on.  Some of those judgments may very well turn out to be remarkably accurate. Others may be based on very little evidence.

💻 And then there's the online version of someone.

In today's world we cannot overlook this aspect. We can get to know people without actually spending very much physical time with them.  Or at least...we THINK we're getting to know them because we might exchange messages every day, "chat" for hours. Share jokes, opinions, fears, frustrations and personal stories. We might watch their videos, see photographs of their lives, follow their posts, learn what makes them laugh or makes them angry. We might learn what they care about. We may even meet them in person occasionally—or several times—and still conduct most of the relationship online.

Something very interesting can happen:

Familiarity can begin to feel like knowing. “I know this person. We talk all the time.”

Perhaps you really do know quite a lot about them but you also know them primarily through the version of themselves that exists within that particular environment.

Online communication gives people enormous control over what they reveal, when they reveal it, and how they present it. After all...

• You can think before responding.

• Rewrite a message.

• Delete it.

• Choose the photograph.

• Choose the story.

• Choose what doesn't get posted.

• Walk away from the conversation when you're angry.

• Return when you're ready.

• And the other person is doing exactly the same thing.

• That doesn't mean they're being deceptive.

• It means the medium itself changes what we get to observe.

🧩 The strange mathematics of familiarity.

You can know an enormous number of details about someone's life and still have surprisingly little information about how they behave under circumstances you've never witnessed.  You might have exchanged thousands of messages and yet you may never have seen them when they're angry and unable to edit themselves. Yes, please read that again.  Angry and not have the option to edit, delete, or step back until they cool down.

Those circumstances can reveal information that conversation alone may never provide, and that's where online familiarity becomes less than accurate.

How much of what we call “knowing someone” is based on the amount of information we have—and how much is based on the kind of information we have? Those are two very different buckets of info.

You can have a mountain of information about someone and still have enormous gaps in your understanding of how they actually function in the physical, messy, inconvenient world.

Here's another wrinkle: Our brains are extraordinarily good at filling those gaps. When information is missing, we don't necessarily experience a big flashing sign saying: "INFORMATION MISSING!"

We often experience a feeling of familiarity instead, and familiarity can feel an awful lot like certainty. That, I think, is a very important piece of this rabbit hole, particularly now that relationships, friendships, communities and even romantic connections can develop substantially—or almost entirely—through screens.

🎭 Are people pretending?

Maybe.  Also...maybe not. This is where things get interesting. We often describe someone who later behaves badly as having “fooled us.”  Or we think they misrepresented themselves at the onset. Sometimes that's absolutely true. People can deliberately deceive others but deliberate deception isn't the only explanation.

Most people also engage in some degree of impression management because we naturally tend to present ourselves differently depending on the situation. A person meeting someone they're attracted to may emphasize their best qualities. Someone starting a new job may be especially conscientious. Someone meeting their partner's family may be unusually polite. Someone trying to make friends may be particularly attentive and agreeable. That doesn't necessarily mean they're lying. They may genuinely be trying to make a good impression and they may also be showing you a real part of themselves.

Just not the entire picture and that's an important distinction.

❤️ The person you met may not have been fake.

Imagine meeting someone who is charming, thoughtful and attentive. That's genuinely who they were with you but later, you discover they're terrible with money or chronically jealous, or emotionally avoidant, or dishonest when they're under pressure, or extraordinarily selfish when their own needs conflict with yours.

Was the original person fake? Not necessarily.  You may simply have encountered one version of a complicated human being. As the relationship becomes more intimate, circumstances and time reveal more layers of the person.

🐇 Circumstances are revealing because now you're watching them respond to real life--and real life is an excellent stress test.

🔥 Character.

• This is a big one!

• How does someone behave when they are disappointed?

• How do they behave when they have power?

• How do they behave when they don't have any power?

• How do they handle being wrong?

• Can they apologize without immediately explaining why the other person caused it?

• Can they tolerate frustration?

• Can they respect a boundary they don't like?

• How do they treat someone who has nothing to offer them?

• How do they behave when doing the right thing costs them something?

These situations don't necessarily create character but sometimes they simply reveal aspects of it that ordinary circumstances never required us to see. 

So...are people revealing themselves over time—or are circumstances simply giving us opportunities to see parts of them that were always there?

🧠 Here's where we need to be careful. 

It would be tempting to say: “Aha! Their true self was always there.” But human beings aren't static machines. People really do change. Sometimes dramatically. Trauma can also change behaviour and so can experience. Therapy can change a person. Parenthood can change behaviour and so can success and failure.

Sometimes people consciously decide: “I don't want to be that person anymore.”
So when someone changes, we shouldn't automatically assume: “That's who they always were.” Sometimes they really are different.

🧩 And then there's us.

That's the part we don't always like to examine. We are participants in the construction of the person we think we know. Our brains don't simply record people like surveillance cameras. We interpret them. We notice some things and miss others.

We give greater weight to information that fits our existing impression and then explain away contradictions and fill in gaps with our imaginations quite well. We create narratives. once we've built a story about someone, new information doesn't necessarily get evaluated from scratch. It gets interpreted through the story we've already built, which means that sometimes when we say: “They changed,” what we really mean is: “I finally acquired enough information to see something I hadn't seen before.”

And sometimes...they actually DID  change.
Those two possibilities can look remarkably similar from the outside.

🪞 The problem with “I know them.”

Knowing sounds finished. It suggests that the investigation is over when maybe it never really is. You can know someone extremely well and still encounter something you didn't know about them and that's not necessarily because they deceived you. It may simply be because people contain more information than any relationship can possibly reveal.

❤️ And what about ourselves?

Maybe we don't even know ourselves as well as we think we do. We may believe: “I would never do that...” until we're placed in circumstances we've never experienced.
We may believe we're extraordinarily patient until we're exhausted, or that we're generous, until generosity costs us something significant.

We may believe we're courageous until something genuinely scares the shit out of us. We might even believe we'd leave an unhealthy relationship immediately until we're deeply entangled in one.

You know, sometimes we discover parts of ourselves because life finally gives us the opportunity to meet them, so maybe knowing another person is partly an exercise in humility.

🐇 The Rabbit Hole gets deeper.

What if relationships aren't simply about discovering who someone is? What if they're also environments in which people become someone? Think about that for a minute. The person you meet at twenty may not be the person you know at forty.

“Who are they really?” may itself be a slightly flawed question right from the get-go because maybe there isn't a single permanent answer.

The uncomfortable question:

When someone slowly reveals themselves to us, are we discovering who they really are—or discovering who they were all along because we finally have enough information to see them? Sometimes it's one. Sometimes it's the other.

Sometimes...it's both.

🔎 Try This:

The next time someone surprises you, resist the immediate urge to decide what the surprise means. Instead ask:

• What exactly changed?

• What did I previously believe about this person?

• What evidence did I actually have for that belief?

• Could this be something new—or something I simply hadn't seen before?
  

• And then maybe the most useful question of all: “What story had I constructed about this person—and what just happened to the story?”

That question turns the investigation inward too. That may be the most honest way to approach another human being: Not with suspicion OR with blind trust, but with curiosity.

We don't have to assume everyone is hiding something or that our first impression was wrong or even that people never change. Maybe we just need to leave a little room for the possibility that we don't have the whole picture yet.

After all...
We're all works in progress.
Some of us are just better at hiding the construction zone.

~ Ziana.

Ziana de Bethune