Why I say I’m fine (when I’m really not)

“Hey Em, how are you doing today?” they asked. Without hesitation, I replied: “I’m fine thanks, how are you?” I can’t be sure — because I was suddenly distracted — but I think they said they were fine too.

But were they? And was I?

Not really.

I always say it. Or a version of it. I’m well, thank you. I’m fine. I’m good. Although I don’t say that last one very often, because my father and I used to joke that “well” was more suitable because we definitely weren’t “good”.

The question that isn’t really a question

“How are you?” does a lot of social work that has nothing to do with actually wanting to know.

It’s a greeting with punctuation. It’s a door-opening that isn’t really an invitation to walk through. We all know this — we participate in the exchange dozens of times a week, on both sides of it — and we respond in exactly the spirit it’s offered: efficiently, pleasantly, and without actually saying anything. Calling out the performance would feel wildly disproportionate. Nobody wants to be the person who responds to “how are you?” with an actual, considered answer while someone is still putting their bag down.

The problem isn’t that people are insincere. Most of them aren’t. It’s that “how are you” has evolved into something closer to hello, I acknowledge you, please acknowledge me back, and we’ve collectively agreed to treat it that way without ever discussing it. The appropriate response is not an honest one. It’s a short one.

So we give a short one. We’ve been giving short ones for years. And somewhere in there, the short one started to feel like the only one that fits.

How fine becomes fluent

Nobody sits down and decides: from now on, I will hide how I feel.

It happens incrementally, and it happens because we’re paying attention. The first time we noticed someone’s eyes move while you were mid-sentence. The time we answered honestly — really honestly — and felt the energy in the room do something subtle and uncomfortable. The friend who asked “how are you?” while already scanning the menu, and we clocked it, and edited accordingly, and she never knew there was an edit.

These moments don’t feel like capitulation when they’re happening. They feel like reading the room. Which is exactly what they are.

We calculate before we speak, and over time we get faster at it. Is this the moment? Is this the friend? Does this friendship have room for what I’m actually carrying right now? Often the answer is no — not because the friendship is bad, but because we’re at a crowded birthday dinner or a quick coffee between pick-ups, and what we’re carrying requires more space than this. So we fold it up. We say fine. We ask how they are instead.

Which works fine, until we realise we’ve been folding things up for quite a while.

The specific shape of “I’m fine”

But being “fine” can be exhausting in a way that’s completely invisible.

Nobody thanks us for it. Nobody even notices it, because that’s the point — the whole skill is that it’s undetectable. We show up, we perform fine, we hold the space for other people’s actual answers, and we head home carrying the same things we arrived with, plus a pleasant feeling of social accomplishment that evaporates in about twenty minutes.

And the accumulation of this — not in one friendship, but across the geography of our social lives — is where it gets quietly complicated. We can look around at the women who know us and realise that quite a few of them have only a version of us. It’s a very well-functioning version, but it’s not a particularly complete one. They know us the way people know someone who always seems fine: fond of us, not worried about us, not really sure what’s actually going on.

That’s not their fault. We’ve been very good at this.

There’s also a specific irony for women who are emotionally perceptive and genuinely interested in other people: we tend to be the person others come to. We’re good at listening. We ask the right questions. We follow up. So we develop a reputation as the stable, sorted friend — the one who has it together — and that reputation starts to quietly foreclose certain conversations. Nobody thinks to ask how we are. Or if they do, they take fine at face value, because we’ve given them no reason not to.

Private isn’t the same as hiding

Before going any further — not everyone who keeps things close is suppressing something. That distinction matters.

Some people are genuinely private. They process internally, they’re selective about what they share, and they feel completely fine (actually fine) about that. Privacy is a choice made from a settled place; it’s about preference, not protection. The person who keeps their inner life largely to themselves because that’s just how they’re built is doing something quite different from the person who would love to be known but has learned, through experience, that disclosure doesn’t go well.

The difference isn’t always obvious from the outside, but it usually is from the inside. Privacy feels chosen. Hiding feels like an adaptation — like we’ve been trained out of something by repeated low-level signals that it’s better not to. If we never feel the gap between what we’re carrying and what we’re saying, we’re probably just private. If we feel the gap all the time but have stopped reaching across it, that’s something else.

Both are fine, actually. But it’s worth knowing which one we’re doing.

The friendships where “I’m fine” isn’t required

Most of us have at least one. The friend where the real answer comes out before we’ve decided to give it. Where “how are you?” is actually a question, and we know it from the way it’s asked — something in the timing, or the eye contact, or the fact that she’s done this before and didn’t flinch.

These friendships don’t always look like the obvious candidates. They’re not necessarily the oldest, or the ones with the most history, or the people we’d list first as our closest friends. Sometimes it’s someone we met relatively recently who just happened to ask twice. Or who answered honestly first, and made it safe to do the same.

What they tend to have in common is less about the friendship’s credentials and more about what happens in the small moments — someone who follows up on the thing you mentioned three weeks ago, or sits with something you said instead of immediately offering a solution, or admits their own version of not fine without waiting to be asked. The safety isn’t declared, it’s demonstrated. Gradually, and then all at once, you realise this is a friendship where you don’t have to perform.

Those friendships are worth recognising and honouring by paying attention. By showing up honestly when we can. By asking twice occasionally. By noticing when someone gives us a real answer and making sure we actually receive it.

That’s really all it takes to be on the other side of this.

What midlife does to “I’m fine”

Something happens in our forties and fifties with how we experience time — it compresses, and it also clarifies. Things that felt costless earlier start to have weight. And one of those things, for a lot of us, is the slow arithmetic of realising how long we’ve been saying fine.

That reckoning doesn’t come with an obvious next step. It’s not like we can suddenly decide to be people who say the real thing, especially not in friendships that have developed a rhythm of mutual fineness, where we’ve both been very professionally okay for years. The social contract is established. The dynamic is comfortable. And any deviation from it feels, weirdly, like it would require more explanation than the thing itself.

What midlife does to fine — more than people-pleasing ever did, more than busyness or habit — is make the cost legible. We start to feel, quite precisely, the cost of never quite saying the real thing. The gap between inner and outer stops feeling like tact and starts feeling like distance.

And we’re not sure, yet, what to do about it. But at least we can see it.

That’s not nothing.