The Ocean We Make of Each Other

There is something unsettling about the realisation that we never fully know another person—not even the ones we have loved for decades.

Think about it honestly. Even in a long and close friendship, even in a marriage of many years, what we actually have is a series of episodes: conversations, shared meals, moments of difficulty and warmth, the occasional glimpse of something deeper than usual. These episodes, however numerous, are only a fraction—a tiny fraction—of that person's continuous existence. Their inner life, their private thoughts, the texture of their experience when we are not present: all of this remains, in the most fundamental sense, inaccessible.

And yet, from those few drops of interaction, we construct an ocean.

We build a complete picture: a person with a character, a set of tendencies, a way of being in the world. Before long, we find ourselves relating to that picture as though it were the person themselves. Most of the time, we don't even notice we've done it.

This is not a failure of love or attention. It is simply the condition of being a self among other selves—each of us enclosed within our own interiority, reaching towards one another across a gap that can be bridged but never entirely closed. What we call knowing someone is really a kind of ongoing, collaborative act of imagination: we take what we are given and extrapolate, generously and imperfectly, towards the whole.

The difficulty begins when we forget that this picture is something we have made.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to intimacy is not ignorance but certainty. The moment we become convinced that we know who another person is, curiosity begins to recede as habituation sets in. We stop asking. We stop noticing. We stop allowing them to surprise us. The relationship becomes less an encounter with a living person than a confirmation of the image we already carry.

What follows from this, if we take it seriously, is a particular kind of humility—not the paralysing kind, but the liberating kind. If the person before me is always larger than my image of them, then my image is necessarily provisional. Always open to revision. There is always more to discover, more to understand, more to be surprised by. A relationship is never complete.

Perhaps this is what genuine curiosity in relating really looks like. Not a polite performance of interest, but the recognition that the other person far exceeds what I will ever know of them—and that this excess is not a problem to be solved but a depth to be honoured.

There is a logodrama exercise I find particularly useful, both in therapeutic work and in life, that makes this concrete. It involves closing your eyes and trying to imagine yourself as you appear through the eyes of someone close to you. Not how you think you come across, nor how you intend to be perceived, but how you actually appear in those specific episodes of interaction that constitute their experience of you.

It is a surprisingly disorienting exercise when done honestly.

We experience ourselves from the inside as continuous beings. We have access to our intentions, our private reasoning, our doubts, our histories and all the countless moments that no one else ever witnesses. Others know us differently. They encounter us only intermittently, only from the outside, and from those episodes they construct their own ocean.

The question this opens is not a comfortable one: who am I, in the relationship, to the person I claim to know and love? Who are they actually experiencing in those moments of contact? And is that person—the one they are experiencing—the person I wish to become?

These questions lead somewhere important. If we are always, to one another, something larger than what can be fully known, then relating is not fundamentally a problem of information. It is not solved by knowing more facts about another person, nor by becoming ever more transparent ourselves. It is solved, to the extent that it can be solved at all, by something more like an orientation: a willingness to remain genuinely curious, to hold our images of one another lightly, and to allow the person before us to become someone other than the person we thought we knew.

We are, as A. N. Whitehead suggested, always prehending one another—each encounter leaving a trace, shifting something, contributing to the continuous process of becoming that neither of us fully controls. Our relationships are therefore not static things that we possess or eventually figure out. They are living processes in which each of us is continually participating and continually changing.

Which means that perhaps the deepest question in any relationship is not “Who are you, exactly?”

It is “Who are we becoming together?”

The ocean we make of each other is never contained. Nor, thankfully, are we.