I feel like there is always a rumor that I'm dating someone that

In the marketplace of faces, where strangers trade stories as if they were spices, a voice rises with weary fire: “There is always a rumor that I’m dating someone I’ve never met. People have their judgments and ideas of who I am, and they know nothing.” Hear how the words move like a drum in fog: first the perpetual rumor, then the counterfeit script of the crowd, and finally the verdict—know nothing. This is a lament against a very old wind: the gale that lifts a name from its body and blows it across the rooftops until the name and the person are no longer kin.

The ancients taught that slander is a thief with soft feet. It steals the quiet of one’s room and replaces it with an echo that will not sleep. To say there is always a rumor is to confess the weight of being watched by eyes that invent what they cannot touch. The heart seeks the simple dignity of being recognized as itself; the crowd prefers the carnival, painting masks over living features. Thus “I’m dating someone I’ve never met” becomes a symbol: the public will marry you to its fantasies and call it news.

Consider a story from the old city. When Socrates stood before the Athenians, he pleaded first against the “earliest accusers”—not those who brought legal charges, but those who had, for years, performed him in rumor and comedy. In their judgments and ideas, he was a corrupter, a sophist, a cloud-chaser. Many had never met him; many knew nothing of his daily life. Yet their invented Socrates walked ahead of the real man, and the jury met that shadow at the door. So powerful is the fable told often enough that it drags truth behind it like a prisoner.

Or take the more recent parable of Hedy Lamarr. To the world she was a dazzling actress—and at that surface the world stopped. Few bothered to meet the mind behind the gaze. Fewer still learned that she co-invented spread-spectrum techniques that would one day undergird wireless communication. The public’s ideas of who she was—ornament, glamour, myth—were comfortable, and therefore chosen. They knew nothing of the restless engineer at her desk. This, too, is the harm of rumor: it shrinks a soul to fit a headline.

The saying also names a cruel arithmetic of fame and small towns alike: proximity is assumed where only coincidence exists; intimacy is declared where only a photograph breathes. A woman takes a meal with a colleague; she is “surely dating.” She encounters a stranger at a gala; by morning, they are lovers in the paper’s imagination. The world assigns stories the way empires assign borders—by drawing lines on maps they did not walk. In such a world, to guard one’s heart is not coldness; it is self-defense.

Yet the remedy is not bitterness but lucid strength. The elder way counsels three shields: truth spoken simply, silence held stubbornly, and a life lived so steadily that false tales die of boredom. Speak when correction protects the innocent; be silent when flame seeks fuel; keep doing the good work that renders rumor small by comparison. Remember: those who know nothing cannot define you, and those who care to know will not be satisfied with borrowed judgments.

Therefore, let this teaching be handed down. Guard the doors of your name. Refuse to become a character in plays you did not audition for. Seek communities where seeing replaces assuming, where questions replace whispers. And when others are the target, become their witness: answer gossip with, “I don’t know—have you met them? Let’s not speak as if we have.”

Carry these practices like amulets: (1) Name the lie without performing it—“That’s not accurate, and I won’t discuss their private life.” (2) Keep a circle of first-hand knowers; anchor your identity in those who actually meet you. (3) Delay judgment: trade the thrill of instant certainty for the slower honor of understanding. (4) When the wind of rumor rises, turn your back to its noise and face your craft, your kin, your compass. In this way, you will outlast the crowd’s ideas, and your life—not their stories—will be the text that teaches who you are. Keywords: rumor, dating, never met, judgments, ideas, know nothing.