The Person You Will Never Meet
There was an ESPN commercial that first aired in 2012 about a Caucasian man in his fifties named Michael Jordan. He walks into various places and introduces himself by name. He is always met with excitement, followed by the inevitable disappointment upon the realization that he is not the expected six-and-a-half-foot-tall NBA hall-of-famer.
The commercial is funny because everyone knows what “Michael Jordan” is supposed to look like. He’s tall. He’s athletic. He’s definitely not Caucasian. The audience easily sympathizes with the people in the commercial who expect one person but find someone entirely different standing in front of them.
We all understand the absurdity of confusing our preconceived notion of someone with their actual appearance. Yet sometimes I wonder whether we quietly do the same thing ourselves.
Sometimes, it starts with someone’s writing. Perhaps there is an individual who is vocal in The Commentator or another YU publication. You see their name periodically and read their opinions, their jokes, their arguments or their peculiar turns of phrase. Their prose might be eloquent, and their convictions strong. Or perhaps their articles consist of plenty of fluff and very little substance.
Maybe there’s someone who constantly texts in group chats you’re a part of. They always ask about minyan times or rides to Teaneck. Maybe they spam flyers for various farbrengens across the tri-state area or constantly ask about professors’ reputations.
Over time, you begin to construct an image of this person in your head. You imagine how they look, how they conduct themselves and how they speak.
Then, one day, you meet them.
And they are nothing like the person you had imagined.
The experience is strangely disorienting. Not because the person has necessarily done anything surprising, but because your mental picture of them was so strong that reality feels like a contradiction.
Perhaps you’ve spent weeks reading someone’s articles and imagined them to be serious and reserved, only to discover that they’re relentlessly sarcastic. Maybe their writing was particularly polished, leading you to expect articulate, confident conversation, only to find them awkward and soft-spoken. Or perhaps you’ve read their arrogant, harsh opinions on paper, only for them to be unusually quiet and self-conscious in person.
Maybe all you had was a name and a profile picture, or the lack of one, and you constructed an entire personality from scratch.
Then comes the uncomfortable realization: Your first impression of this person wasn’t entirely based on them. It was based on who you thought they were.
This points to the root of a problem more complicated than simply judging someone on a first impression. We often judge a person long before we even meet them.
And once we have formed that picture, we don’t necessarily discard it when reality contradicts it. Instead, we try to reconcile the two. I assumed he would be taller, but I can see he’s slouching a bit. Her bluntness must be an exception to her usual vulnerability. Maybe he’s just a doppelgänger; they can’t possibly be the same person.
Ironically, the more information we gather about someone beforehand, the more vulnerable we may become to making these mistakes.
This problem is intensified by the many ways we encounter people without actually knowing them: social media, newspapers, podcasts, group chats and even shidduch resumes. Each presents carefully selected pieces of a person. Even when those pieces are genuine, they are still only pieces. When we encounter fragments without the whole, we instinctively fill in the missing details.
Often, we fill them in incorrectly.
A newspaper columnist isn’t necessarily their article. Someone’s personality in class might differ from how they act with close friends. Someone who appears confident from a stranger's perspective might be nervous when meeting new people. Someone who writes eloquently might stumble over their words in conversation. These contradictions don’t necessarily indicate hypocrisy. They simply reflect the fact that a person’s character is more complicated than what appears on a screen, on a page or in any single environment.
How can we rid ourselves of this habit? The answer cannot simply be to stop forming first impressions. That would probably be impossible.
Instead, perhaps we should become more comfortable with being wrong. If someone looks different from how we imagined, let them. If their personality contradicts their writing, let it. If the person in front of us doesn’t resemble their name or profile picture, perhaps the appropriate response isn’t to explain away the contradiction.
Perhaps it is simply to recognize that our original picture was incomplete.
The ordinary guy named Michael Jordan never promised to be someone he wasn’t. Neither do our classmates.
Photo caption: We often develop an impression of someone long before meeting them in person.
Photo credit: Unsplash
