The Vulnerability Paradox
DETAILS
When — May 2025
Category — Reflections
Reading time — 3 minutes
The Vulnerability Paradox
A curious thing happens in hotel rooms. Something about the neutral territory, the anonymity of a space that belongs to neither of us, creates unexpected honesty.
Last week, a client – successful venture capitalist, married fifteen years – spent our first hour together showing me photos of his children. Not what I expected, certainly not what he’d arranged our evening for. But there was something almost desperate in his need to be seen as a complete person, not just the transaction he’d initiated.
“No one in my life knows all of me,” he admitted around midnight, staring at the ceiling. “My wife knows the faithful version. My colleagues know the ruthless version. My friends know the fun version. But no one knows all of it.”
I’ve encountered this confession countless times in different words. This compartmentalization of self seems practically universal among the men I meet. They’ve divided themselves into acceptable fragments, showing each person in their life only the appropriate pieces.
The irony doesn’t escape me – they reveal their most authentic selves to someone they’re paying. There’s a strange safety in the transaction, a freedom in the temporary. No ongoing expectations, no accumulated disappointments. Just a brief window where the masks can drop.
One client described it perfectly: “I don’t have to worry about how my honesty will affect next Tuesday’s dinner conversation or next month’s performance review.”
I’ve become skilled at holding these temporary intimacies – creating spaces where vulnerability feels safe, then letting them return to lives where these truths remain unspoken. It’s a peculiar responsibility, being the keeper of secrets that wives, friends and therapists never hear.
Sometimes I wonder about these separate selves we all maintain. The versions we show to lovers, to friends, to the world. Is integration possible? Or are we all destined to be partially known in fragments, never wholly seen except in these strange, liminal encounters?
I don’t have answers, only observations from this unique vantage point where people show me sides they’ve hidden from those they truly love – all while I remain essentially a stranger.
Perhaps the most valuable thing I offer isn’t physical at all, but simply the rare freedom to be contradictory, complex, and whole – if only for a night.
Until next time,
Alessandra