The people who made me feel most invisible in my life were almost always people who genuinely liked me.
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Research suggests that a significant portion of young workers struggle with loneliness, but here's what stopped me cold: the loneliest respondents weren't necessarily isolated. Many of them were surrounded by colleagues, managers, even friends. They had people. What they didn't have was the experience of being genuinely known by any of them. And that distinction, between being liked and being known, is something I spent about four decades failing to understand.
I taught AP Literature for 32 years. I spent entire careers' worth of hours helping seventeen-year-olds understand what Fitzgerald meant when he wrote about Gatsby reaching toward that green light. The longing. The closeness that was never quite close enough. And the whole time I was teaching it, I was living a quieter version of the same thing. I had warmth in my life. I had fondness. I had people who would have said, without hesitation, that they cared about me. What I didn't have, for longer than I'd like to admit, was anyone who asked me a question and then actually waited for the real answer.
Fondness Is Easy. Curiosity Costs Something.
There's a difference between someone who is glad you're in the room and someone who wonders what's happening behind your eyes. Fondness is reflexive. You develop it the way you develop a taste for the coffee at your regular café. It requires proximity and repetition, not effort. Curiosity about another person, the kind that makes you lean in, follow up, sit with something uncomfortable they just said, that takes energy. And most people, even good people, are conserving energy.
I think about this in the context of my years teaching. My colleagues liked me. They'd wave in the hallway, ask how my weekend was, bring me a muffin from the staff room if they grabbed one for themselves. But after my second husband died, and I came back to work after two weeks of leave because I couldn't stand being alone in the house anymore, almost nobody asked me how I was doing beyond the first week. They were fond of me. They just weren't curious about what grief was doing to me. And I can't blame them, because I was performing fine. I was holding it together so convincingly that curiosity would have felt unnecessary.
That's the mechanism. Fondness reads the surface. Curiosity digs beneath it. And when you're someone who's good at surfaces (and I was, for decades), fondness feels like enough until it suddenly doesn't.
The Room Full of People Who Like You
After I retired, when my knees finally made standing in front of a classroom impossible, I went through about six months where I barely left the house. Then I forced myself into social situations: a book club, a community dinner series, a neighbor's regular Friday gathering. Everyone was pleasant. Everyone remembered my name. One woman always touched my arm when she said hello, which I think was supposed to communicate warmth, and it did, in the way a space heater communicates warmth. Functional. Impersonal. Appreciated but not transformative.
I'd come home from those gatherings feeling worse than when I'd left. For a long time, I thought something was wrong with me. I was getting what I supposedly needed: human contact, social connection, friendly faces. But research on disconnection suggests what I was experiencing is common. Many people describe feeling loneliest in rooms full of others, at work, within families, even in long-standing relationships. They socialize regularly and still feel unknown. The physical presence of other people doesn't resolve the specific ache of not being seen by them.
Nobody tells you that loneliness has a particular subtype that only activates in company. You can handle being alone in your apartment. You've made peace with that. What breaks something inside you is sitting at a table with six people who all seem happy you're there, and realizing that if you disappeared for three weeks, the first person to notice would be the woman who touches your arm, and she'd only notice because the chair was empty.
Why Curiosity Feels So Rare
I've been thinking about why genuine curiosity about another person has become so scarce, and I don't think the answer is that people have gotten crueler or more selfish. I think the answer is that curiosity requires a kind of stillness that most people can no longer access. To be truly curious about someone, you have to stop performing your own life long enough to pay attention to theirs. You have to tolerate not knowing. You have to ask a question you don't already have an answer to and sit with whatever comes back.
That's hard. Particularly now, when so much of social interaction is built around the exchange of curated information. People tell you what they want you to know. You tell them what you want them to know. Everyone walks away having had a "good conversation" that was actually two parallel monologues delivered with eye contact.
I did this for years as a teacher. Parents would come in for conferences, and I'd ask about their child, and they'd give me the version of their child they'd rehearsed. I'd give them the version of their child I'd documented. We'd shake hands and feel productive. But the moments I actually connected with a parent were the rare ones where someone dropped the script. Where a father said, "I don't know what's going on with him, honestly. I don't know how to talk to him anymore." That honesty demanded curiosity from me, and the curiosity I offered back created something real between us, even if it only lasted fifteen minutes.
Writers on this site have explored how the loneliest people in social circles are often the ones holding everything together, the organizers, the hosts. That resonated with me. When you're the person who remembers birthdays and brings the hummus and asks everyone else how they're doing, people assume you're fine. Their fondness for you is genuine. Their curiosity about you is nonexistent. Because you've trained them, through years of competent caretaking, to believe you don't need it.
What It Means to Feel Known
My father ran a souvlaki shop in Hamilton for 30 years. He knew hundreds of customers by name. They liked him. They'd shake his hand, ask about business, tell him the lamb was perfect. He'd smile and nod and give them a little extra on the plate. But I don't think he felt known by any of them. He once told me, in Greek, something that I'd translate roughly as: "They love the food. They like the man who gives them the food. But they don't see the man." I was twenty when he said it. I didn't understand. I do now.
Feeling known requires someone who approaches you with curiosity rather than judgment, who treats you less like a fixed object and more like a text worth rereading. The literature teacher in me can't help the metaphor: most people read you like a headline. They get the gist. They move on. The rare person reads you like a novel, noticing the contradictions, the silences, the places where the narrative shifts.
When my second husband was alive, he had that quality. He'd notice when I was performing fine. He'd say, "You're doing your teacher voice," which was his way of telling me I was narrating my emotions instead of feeling them. That observation, that small act of curiosity about what was actually happening underneath my composure, made me feel more loved than any anniversary dinner or gift ever did.
After he died, I realized how much of my sense of being "known" had rested on one person. That's a fragile architecture. And I think many people build it the same way: one partner, maybe two close friends, who actually see them. Everyone else runs on fondness. When the one or two people who provided depth disappear, you're left in a room full of warmth that can't reach you.
I sat with this question for months before recording a video about how our culture's obsession with being "special" actually creates the very isolation we're trying to escape (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftOGA32vc40)—because when everyone's performing uniqueness, nobody's being genuinely known.
The Quiet Cost of Being Liked but Not Asked
A recent framework in psychology compares our modern social condition to a kind of "social diabetes," where we consume enormous quantities of connection that lack the nutrients we actually need. I think that's exactly right. We're overfed on fondness and starving for depth. We have more contact than any generation in history and less of the specific kind of contact that makes a person feel genuinely accompanied through their life.
I see this in the way people endure discomfort without complaint, especially people my age, who were raised to keep things together and never learned how to signal that they needed someone to look closer. We became experts at receiving fondness gracefully. We smile. We say we're fine. We bring the hummus. And the people around us, who are also conserving energy, who are also overfed on shallow connection, accept the performance because it's easier than investigating it.
The cost shows up slowly. You start to feel like a supporting character in your own social life. You know details about everyone around you because you asked, but nobody knows corresponding details about you because nobody thought to. You develop a persistent low-grade sense that you could be replaced by anyone with a similar temperament and similar availability, because the thing that makes you specifically you has never been requested.
What I've Learned, Slowly
I started writing at 66. I became a gamer at 67. Both of those strange late-life pivots taught me something about curiosity that I wish I'd understood earlier. In my online gaming guild, a twenty-three-year-old once asked me why I played a healer class instead of damage. I told him I spent 32 years taking care of a classroom full of kids and apparently couldn't stop. He laughed, then asked a follow-up: "Do you think you pick healer because you're good at it, or because you're scared to try something where you might fail?" He was twenty-three. He'd known me for two months. And he asked me a better question than most people in my physical life had asked in years.
That's the quiet person who decides speaking is worth the cost. That's curiosity in action. And the thing I've come to believe, after 67 years and two marriages and 32 years in a classroom and a grief that rearranged my entire understanding of connection, is that you can survive a life without fondness. People do it. But you cannot thrive in a life without curiosity directed at you. Without someone who looks at you and wonders, genuinely wonders, what's actually going on in there.
I still go to the Friday gathering. The woman still touches my arm. But last month, I tried something different. Instead of waiting to be asked, I told someone an honest thing about myself, unprompted. I said I'd been having trouble sleeping because I keep dreaming about my classroom, and I can never find the lesson plan, and I wake up panicked. She paused. Then she asked me what I thought it meant. And for the first time in a long time, I felt the temperature in the room change. Fondness, finally, with something underneath it.
