Stop Pretending You Don't Care

Vulnerability feels scary, but it’s worthwhile

When the text came in, Zara felt something tighten in her chest. She’d been waiting all afternoon for Hannah to respond to schedule a coffee meetup. They’d met a few weeks before and quickly bonded as the slowest girls in their run club. But something about the text — “I normally don’t connect with people this easily. It’s so nice to have a friend. Want to hang out on Saturday?” — made Zara squirm.

“Why didn’t you respond?” I asked Zara as she fidgeted with her hair on my couch.

“I don’t know, there was something about her assuming we were friends already that made me not want to hang out with her anymore… It just gave me the ick.”

The ick is something I’ve had probably hundreds of sessions about, so let me skip to the ending: the ick is rarely about the other person. It’s that our culture has decided that openly wanting things — visibly and without irony — is embarrassing. And that genuinely caring makes you look stupid. So when someone shows up earnestly, we recoil.

If you want a relationship, you’re a pick-me. Try too hard at your job and you’re a try-hard. Care about the outcome of an election or a friendship or a creative project, and someone will ask why you’re letting it get to you. So we’ve gotten very good at performing the opposite. We pre-qualify our interest. We deflect compliments. We text “No pressure!” and “No worries if not!” These phrases give us plausible deniability in case we come on too strong.

Protecting yourself from being seen trying is an old move that most of us learned in middle school. But the internet has raised the stakes — everything can be screenshotted, recorded, and posted for strangers to weigh in on. Detachment has become a necessary self-defense.

This performance costs more than you realize because you have to manage two layers at once: what you actually feel and what you show to the world. Most people think they’re tired because they care too much, but they’re actually tired because they’ve spent the day pretending they don’t. Eventually the performance stops being a performance. You start to believe you shouldn’t take anything seriously. Until one day someone asks what you actually want and you genuinely don’t know, because you’ve been so busy not wanting visibly that you’ve forgotten how to want anything at all.

You’re significantly more likely to get what you want when you actually go for it. Hiding feels safer, but it also means you lose the things you never let yourself want. So start by saying the hard thing out loud. Text your friend that you missed her. Ask your crush out on a date. Tell your friends you’re hoping the job offer comes through. It will feel mortifying in the moment, but it’s the only way to get what you want.

A few weeks later, Zara came back to my office. Hannah had posted a photo on Instagram of herself having brunch with two women from the run club. Then another, laughing at a bar. “She just, like, made other friends,” Zara said. She sounded surprised, as if it hadn’t occurred to her that Hannah would keep going without her.

We sat with it. Zara didn’t have much to say. She’d waited too long, and it felt like the window had closed. Months later, she told me about a new coworker she’d been hitting it off with. They’d had lunch a few times and Zara liked her. “I almost did the thing again,” she said. “I felt myself wanting to play it cool.” Instead, she texted the coworker that weekend and asked if she wanted to grab a drink. Zara had realized she would rather look like she was coming on too strong than lose a potential friend.

Most of us have a list of people we never followed up with, jobs we didn’t apply for, things we wanted but didn’t have the courage to say out loud. You can’t go back and change what happened, but you can show up differently in the future. Stop pretending you don’t care.