The Look, and Why We Hide

There’s a moment most people recognize but don’t articulate. You’re with someone you love, or might love, and they’re just watching you. Not staring, not analyzing, just… looking. In response, something in you shifts. You suddenly become aware of your hands, the way you’re sitting, the face you’re making. You feel, briefly, like an object being examined rather than a person existing. Sartre would say: yes, exactly. That’s the point.

His concept of le regard/the Look, introduced in Being and Nothingness (1943), is worth understanding before we get to the relationship stuff, because most summaries flatten it to a literal interpretation. The Look isn’t just about eye contact. It’s about what happens to your sense of self when another consciousness turns toward you.

Sartre argues that consciousness is fundamentally free. It’s always reaching beyond what it is, always in the process of becoming. He calls this pour-soi, the “for-itself.” A rock just is what it is. You’re never just what you are. You’re always also what you’re doing with what you are.

The problem is that another person’s gaze threatens this. When someone looks at you, they see you as a thing with fixed properties. She’s nervous. He’s arrogant. They’re sad. The other person reduces your fluid, ongoing self into an object, an en-soi, a “in-itself” and you feel it. That’s what shame is, Sartre says in Being and Nothingness. Not guilt exactly, shame is the sudden experience of being seen as a fixed thing, of discovering yourself as an object in someone else’s world. Which is a strange foundation for intimacy.

Being loved, in the Sartrean sense, means being perceived constantly. Your partner has a version of you in their head comprised of accumulated impressions, interpretations, a story they’re telling about who you are. That version is, inevitably, a reduction. Not because they’re cruel or shallow, but because that’s arguably part of what consciousness does to other consciousness. This is probably why long-term partners sometimes say they feel unseen even in otherwise functional relationships; not that their partner isn’t looking, but that the look has hardened into assumption.

Sartre thought this created an irresolvable tension at the heart of love. In Being and Nothingness, he describes the lover’s project as essentially contradictory: you want to be loved by someone free, a person who chooses you, but you also want their freedom to somehow guarantee your value, to make you solid and real. You want to be the necessary object of a free subject. Which is like wanting someone to freely choose to have no choice. It doesn’t work. The lover is caught between wanting the other to be free (so the love means something) and wanting them to be captured (so the love feels secure).

The only honest response to this is to sit with the contradiction rather than resolve it dishonestly. Which brings us to bad faith. Mauvaise foi/bad faith, is Sartre’s term for the way we lie to ourselves about our freedom. The famous example in Being and Nothingness is a waiter who performs being a waiter with such robotic precision that he seems to believe he is a waiter in the way a stone is a stone. He’s denying that he could, at any moment, walk out. He’s hiding from his own freedom because freedom is terrifying. In relationships, bad faith looks a little different but runs on the same engine. Some patterns are pretty recognizable once you’ve got the framework:

Staying in a relationship, or leaving one, or behaving a certain way within it and framing it as inevitable. I can’t help how I feel. I don’t have a choice. This is just who I am. Sartre would say: you’re always choosing. Pretending otherwise is bad faith. The relationship becomes a cage you’ve built yourself and then forgotten you built. Becoming the partner so thoroughly that the role swallows the person. This one is seductive because it reduces anxiety; if you’re just performing a character, you don’t have to make the ongoing, terrifying decisions of an actually free person. But it also means the person your partner loves is, increasingly, a performance. This might be one reason some people feel most themselves around acquaintances rather than close partners, there’s less accumulated character to maintain.

Sartre describes how people try to resolve the discomfort of the Look by making the other person into a reflection rather than a subject. You stop encountering them as genuinely other, a consciousness with their own inner life that you can’t access, and start seeing them as confirmation of your own self-image. It’s more comfortable. It’s also a kind of loneliness wearing the costume of connection. There’s a version of this that goes the other way, too. Sometimes people refuse to be seen not because they’re in bad faith, but because they understand, dimly, that being seen means being fixed. Being loved, in this sense, feels like a threat to your freedom rather than an extension of it. You let someone in and suddenly you have a character. You’re the kind of person who does this. There’s an expectation of continuity, you’re supposed to remain who they fell in love with.

This might explain something puzzling about how some people behave when relationships get serious: a kind of pulling away that doesn’t seem to be about the other person at all. It’s not that they’ve fallen out of love. It’s that love is starting to feel like a definition, and definitions feel like traps. Sartre’s view of love is, famously, pretty bleak. In No Exit (1944), he gives us the line that gets badly misquoted. “Hell is other people” isn’t a misanthropic slogan. In context, the hell is specifically the eternal gaze of others, being permanently fixed by their perceptions with no possibility of revision or escape.

I think there’s also something in Being and Nothingness that’s more interesting than pure pessimism. Sartre doesn’t say the Look is only threatening. Being witnessed is also, in some sense, what makes you real. The uncomfortable part is inseparable from the meaningful part. You can’t be truly known without being somewhat fixed. You can’t be truly loved without surrendering some of your radical, untethered freedom.

The question isn’t how to avoid this tension, you can’t, but whether you can stay honest inside it. Whether you can catch yourself performing, or hiding, or turning your partner into a mirror, and choose differently. Not once, but as an ongoing, uncomfortable project. Sartre would probably say that’s the most human thing you can do. He’d also probably say don’t expect it to be comfortable. He wasn’t a comforting philosopher.