Being Someone Else
When I was in a room with a man I was not entirely myself. This is not the same as saying I was performing or pretending, though those words might reach for it. It is closer to saying that I brought into the room what the room required, and left outside it what the room did not.
The parts of me that were relevant—the attention, the warmth, the particular quality of unhurried presence, the willingness to receive what a man brought without doing something immediate with it—those were genuine. They were me. But the rest of me—the interests, the previous career, the opinions about things that had nothing to do with the hour we were sharing—I left at the door with the same naturalness as leaving a coat. The session wasn’t organised around me.
When a man asked about me directly, which some men did and some men didn’t, I gave enough to place me in the world without giving the kind of detail that would redirect the session’s attention. Enough to establish that I had come from somewhere, had thought about things, was not without a history. If he wanted more than that I pointed him toward the professional summary on the website, positioned at a slight remove from the pages most visitors encountered. The information existed. The session was not the place for it.
I have been thinking about what this meant—the withholding of the fuller self—and I find I am not sure withholding is the right word. A surgeon in an operating theatre does not discuss his weekend plans during the procedure. A teacher, managing a classroom, is present in a specific way that does not include every dimension of who they are outside the classroom. The room has a purpose and the purpose shapes what of the self is relevant. What I brought to the session was real. It was simply edited for the context, the way any professional self is edited for any professional context, and the editing felt no more like pretence to me than it does to anyone who works with other people in a defined role.
The complication arose from what the editing allowed some men to construct in its place. Kindness, attentiveness, generosity—these are, I notice, the qualities that tend to be in short supply in a man’s ordinary experience of being with other men, and when they arrived in concentrated form, in a context that was also intimate, something could happen that I can only describe from the outside. A man would say something, sometimes reaching for the word and not quite landing, that amounted to: I love you. I want to say there were at least three versions of this, and they felt different to be on the receiving end of.
The first arrived in the moment, unplanned, at the end of a session or during it—a man temporarily at a loss for words to describe how good he felt and reaching for the nearest superlative, which happened to be that one. I found I could receive this version without difficulty. I understood it as the expression it was—the reaching of a man who had encountered something he hadn’t expected and was gesturing at its intensity. Men do not always hear what they say. They do not always mean exactly what the words mean. The word love, in that moment, was less a declaration than a direction—pointing toward something in the room that had been real, and naming it with the largest word available. I accepted the word in the spirit it was offered.
The second version arrived as pattern. A man who had visited once and found the experience significant would want to visit again, which was fine, and then again, which was also fine, and then the visits would develop a particular texture—slightly more expectant each time, slightly more invested in the continuity itself rather than in what the continuity contained. This version usually resolved itself over time. The visits would become less frequent, the investment would recalibrate to something more sustainable, and the pattern would gradually ease back toward something the session could actually hold. I waited it out more often than I addressed it.
The third version required a different kind of attention, and I want to describe what it looked like because the description is more useful than the category. A man would begin to express a wish that I might retire from the work and be available exclusively to him. He would describe this as something I would want, once I understood it clearly, as though the arrangement would benefit me as well as him. He would return to this idea across several visits, or several phone calls, as though the repetition might eventually produce a different response. He would, if I declined in ordinary terms, escalate the expression of what he felt, adding detail and intensity as though the intensity itself might make the thing become possible. A few such men, when ordinary declining proved insufficient, encountered significantly higher fees and found, to their visible surprise, that the fees worked where the words had not. A smaller number required a more complete absence of response, which I provided.
I found myself wondering, in those situations, what the man thought he was in love with. Not with scepticism about the feeling itself—the feeling was evidently real, producing real effects in how he spoke and what he did—but with genuine curiosity about its object. He had encountered the version of me that the room contained. That version was genuine but partial.
The fuller self I had left at the door was not available to him, had never been offered, and he had no way of knowing what it contained. What he had constructed, out of the attentiveness and the warmth and the particular quality of being received without judgement—what he had made from those materials—was a person. But the person was as much his construction as my offering, perhaps more. I had provided the materials. He had assembled something and then fallen in love with the assembly.
The version I preferred—and this word feels accurate here—was the man who arrived at the end of a session or its aftermath with something inarticulate on his face or in what he said, something that pointed at the experience without claiming to own it. The man who was at a loss for words and knew he was at a loss for words and was satisfied with the gesture toward the thing rather than needing to possess the thing. Who appreciated, in whatever way appreciation operates in a man who has just been well looked after, that what had happened was what it was—bounded by the session, real within those bounds, not requiring anything outside them to be fully itself.
That man I could sit with easily. The transaction had been completed in the sense that mattered: something real had happened between two people in a room, and both of them knew it was real, and neither of them was asking it to be something else. He would leave and the thing he was leaving would not follow him home in the way that obligations follow, or claims. It would simply be something that had happened, which he carried as the experience it was, in the same way you carry any afternoon that turned out to be better than expected.
What I was for the duration of his visit was a particular version of me, shaped by what the work required and what he brought to it. When he left, I went back to being the fuller version. The coat, as it were, was at the door where I had left it.
Whether there is anything to conclude from this I genuinely cannot determine. I notice it as a feature of the work that I found interesting throughout the years I did it—the question of what of the self is present in a room and what remains outside, and what the other person constructs out of the partial self he encounters. It is not a question I have answered. It is a question I sat with, and that certain men occasionally sat with too, in the space that the session created for whatever arrived.
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