We All Think We See People Clearly… But Do We?

I’ve been thinking about something recently.

I’ve always liked to think I judge people as individuals. I think most of us probably do. We’d all like to believe we look beyond someone’s race, nationality, religion or appearance and simply see the person standing in front of us. We tell ourselves that we make up our minds based on who someone is, not the labels attached to them.

But do we? Or do we simply believe we do because we rarely notice the lens we’re looking through?

Over the last few years, I’ve shared a lot of our life online, and one thing I’ve found fascinating isn’t actually the comments themselves. It’s the certainty behind them.

Complete strangers will tell me they already know how my story ends.

“He’s only here for a visa.”

“He’ll change eventually.”

“Nigerian men are all the same.”

At first, those comments frustrated me. Then they upset me. But somewhere along the way, something changed. Instead of feeling defensive, I found myself becoming curious.

Where does that certainty come from?

The obvious answer would be prejudice, but I honestly don’t think that’s the whole story. The more I reflected on it, the more I realised many of those comments come from something much more human than that.

Experience. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that many of those comments weren’t necessarily rooted in hatred. they were rooted in something much more familiar: people’s own lived experiences.

If you’ve trusted someone who betrayed you, of course that changes the way you see the world. If you’ve loved someone who manipulated you or repeatedly let you down, it would be strange if you didn’t become more cautious afterwards. Our brains are constantly trying to protect us. They’re always asking, Have I seen this before? and What happened last time?

It’s actually an incredible survival mechanism. Without it, we’d probably spend our lives making the same mistakes over and over again.

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve wondered whether that same survival mechanism sometimes creates a different problem.

At what point does recognising patterns stop protecting us and start limiting the way we see other people?

There’s a huge difference between saying, “This person hurt me,” and saying, “People like this always hurt people.” The first sentence belongs to your story. The second quietly places somebody else inside it.

The more I’ve reflected on this, the more I’ve realised how often we all do it. We do it with nationality, race, religion, politics, professions, generations and countless other things. Once our brains believe they’ve recognised a pattern, they naturally begin looking for more evidence that confirms it. We don’t usually do it deliberately. In fact, most of the time we probably don’t even realise we’re doing it.

Maybe that’s why these conversations become so difficult. One person is speaking from genuine pain, while another is speaking from genuine love. Neither person is necessarily lying. They’re simply describing different experiences and reaching different conclusions.

That thought has stayed with me because it brings me back to my husband. To many people online, he’s a Nigerian man. To me, he’s my husband.

That doesn’t mean I don’t see or value his Nigerian identity. Quite the opposite. His culture has become part of my life and part of our children’s lives and it’s something I value deeply. But it isn’t the first thing I think about when I think about him. I think about his character.

Over the last six years, I’ve watched him love me through more versions of myself than I ever imagined someone could. He’s known the happiest version of me, the anxious version, the exhausted version, the angry version and the version of me who was simply trying to survive one day at a time.

He’s supported me through some of my worst ulcerative colitis flares, when I felt stripped of every ounce of dignity. He held me after we lost our daughter, Ocean, gently encouraging me to keep finding tiny moments of light when I couldn’t imagine ever feeling whole again. He’s the dad who instinctively runs to catch a sick child’s vomit in his hands before it lands on the sofa, not because anyone asked him to, but because that’s simply the kind of person he is.

None of those moments tell me anything about Nigerian men. They tell me everything about this man, and I think that’s an important distinction.

Does my experience mean every Nigerian man is like my husband? Of course it doesn’t. Just as someone else’s painful experience doesn’t mean every Nigerian man isn’t. Both experiences are real, but neither can tell us the character of someone we’ve never met. Nationality tells us where someone comes from. Character tells us who they are. Those are two very different things.

Something else I’ve noticed is how social media quietly changes the way we think. If enough people with similar experiences gather beneath the same post, it can begin to feel as though those experiences are universal. Meanwhile, thousands of people living entirely different stories remain silent, not because they don’t exist, but because contentment rarely announces itself as loudly as pain. The loudest stories often shape our perception of reality, even when they’re only one part of a much bigger picture.

I don’t think the answer is to ignore people’s experiences. Quite the opposite. Pain deserves compassion. It deserves to be heard. Those stories matter. But I also don’t think one person’s experience should quietly become another person’s identity. I think the challenge is learning to hold two truths at the same time: someone’s experience can be deeply painful, completely valid and real, while not being true of every person who shared that nationality, race or label.

Maybe that’s where wisdom begins. Not by pretending we don’t have biases - we all do - but by recognising them, and then having the humility to ask ourselves whether the person standing in front of us deserves the chance to show us who they really are before we’ve already decided who they are.

Because the more I’ve thought about all of this, the more I’ve realised that my husband’s nationality may be one part of his identity, but it has never been the reason I love him.

His character is.

Maybe the greatest gift we can give another human being is the chance to be known for their character, rather than judged by the stories we’ve attached to people who look like them, come from the same place as them, or share the same label.

I wonder how different the world would look if more of us started there.