On a train to Chittagong, I told a stranger my marriage was falling apart.
I had not told my mother. I had not told my brother. I had not told my closest friend. But this man—whose name I never learned, whose face I would not recognize today—heard everything. The fights, the silences, the nights I slept on the couch. I told him things I had not even admitted to myself until the words came out.
He listened. He nodded. He said something kind that I have forgotten. Then he got off at his station, and I never saw him again.
That night I called my mother. “How are you?” she asked. “Everything is fine,” I said. “Work is good. Marriage is good. Everything is fine.”
I have thought about this contradiction for years. Why is it easier to be honest with strangers than with the people who love us most?
The simple answer is stakes. With strangers, there are none. This man on the train would never see me again. He had no expectations of me, no history with me, no future with me. My failure did not disappoint him because he had never hoped anything for me. My weakness did not change his image of me because he had no image to change.
But my mother—my mother has spent her entire life building an image of me. She has hoped, worried, prayed, sacrificed. In her mind, I am someone specific. Someone successful. Someone whose life turned out well because she raised me right. If I tell her my marriage is failing, I am not just sharing information. I am dismantling something she built. I am proving that her prayers did not work, her sacrifices did not pay off, her son is not who she believed him to be.
I cannot do that to her. So I say everything is fine.
This is the strange mathematics of love. The more someone cares, the harder it is to disappoint them. The deeper the relationship, the higher the cost of honesty. We protect the people we love from the truth about ourselves because their pain would become our pain, doubled.
Strangers are free from this equation. They do not care enough to be hurt. Their judgment, if it comes, is temporary. It does not echo through years of relationship. It does not change how they see us at family gatherings. It does not become a lens through which every future interaction is filtered.
I know a woman who told her hairdresser about her affair. The hairdresser she had known for six months. She had not told her sister, whom she had known her entire life. When I asked why, she said: “My sister would never look at me the same way. The hairdresser will forget by next week.”
This is the gift of anonymity. Not just that strangers don’t know our past, but that they don’t occupy our future. We can confess to them and then walk away. The confession does not follow us. It stays on the train, in the salon, at the bar where we met someone we’ll never meet again.
With family, nothing stays behind. Everything follows us forever.
But there is something deeper here. Something more painful than stakes or consequences.
I think we fear that family love is more conditional than it claims to be.
Family says: we love you no matter what. But we are not sure we believe it. We have seen love withdrawn. We have seen disappointment harden into distance. We have watched relatives become strangers after secrets emerged. We know that “unconditional” is a word people use, not always a reality they deliver.
So we test the limits carefully. We reveal small flaws first and watch the reaction. If the love holds, we reveal slightly more. But the big things—the failures that shake our identity, the shames we barely admit to ourselves—these we keep hidden. We cannot risk discovering that unconditional love has conditions after all.
With strangers, we risk nothing. If they reject us, we lose nothing we had. If they accept us, we gain a moment of grace from an unexpected source. The equation is entirely upside.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if I told my mother everything. Not just that my marriage struggled—it has since recovered—but all of it. The doubts I carry. The mistakes I’ve made. The person I am when no one is watching.
Would she still love me? Probably. Almost certainly. But the probably is the problem. The almost certainly is not certainly. And that small gap of uncertainty is enough to keep my mouth closed.
The stranger on the train did not love me. That is why I could be honest with him. He offered something my mother cannot offer: the freedom of not mattering. I could fall apart in front of him without consequence. I could be weak without damaging a relationship I need.
Perhaps this is what therapy provides. A stranger who is paid to listen, who has no stake in your success, who will not be disappointed by your failure. You can say anything because nothing is at risk. The therapeutic relationship is intimate precisely because it is bounded. It ends when the hour ends. It does not follow you home.
My mother’s love follows me everywhere. It is the most precious thing I have. And it is the very reason I cannot be fully honest with her.
This is the paradox of intimacy. The closer someone is, the more we hide. The more they matter, the less we reveal. We save our full selves for people who will never know our names.
I do not know how to solve this. I do not know if it can be solved. Perhaps some distance is necessary even in love. Perhaps total honesty is too much weight for any relationship to bear. Perhaps we need strangers precisely because we need somewhere to put the parts of ourselves that love cannot hold.
But sometimes, late at night, I wonder what it would be like. To tell my mother everything. To let her see me as the stranger on the train saw me—confused, failing, uncertain. To trust that her love would survive the truth.
I have not done it yet. I may never do it.
But the wanting is there. The wish to be fully known by the people who fully matter.
Maybe that is enough for now. The wanting. The wish.
Maybe someday the fear will be smaller than the need.
Maybe someday I will tell her everything is not fine.
And maybe—probably—almost certainly—she will love me anyway.