When I don't have a girlfriend, who I am answerable to, I can go

In the bright bazaar where eyes are many and patience is few, a man speaks plainly of the cost of visibility: “When I don’t have a girlfriend, who I am answerable to, I can go out and hang with people. But whether you go for a movie with someone or a meal or a drive, it is assumed that you are dating that person.” Beneath this modern cadence lies an old tension: the private self trying to breathe under the public gaze. The heart seeks simple companionship; the crowd, hungry for stories, sews a wedding garment from a handkerchief of facts.

In earlier ages the village square performed the work now done by headlines and timelines. To step through that square with another was to invite whispers, a choreography of glances that turned ordinary errands into spectacle. What this saying names is the tyranny of inference: how a movie, a shared meal, a night drive—each innocent act—can be drafted into a narrative the soul never authored. The speaker’s contrast is sharp: with no girlfriend, he owes no accounting; with a girlfriend, he is answerable by covenant and care. But to the watching world, both the solitary stroll and the crowded table are grist for the mill.

The elders would call this a confusion of signs and vows. In true bonds, meaning is made by promises, not by proximity. You are dating when two mouths say so and two lives begin to arrange themselves accordingly. The marketplace reverses this: it lets proximity pronounce the vow and then demands the heart keep pace with rumor. Such reversal steals freedom from friendship, making every shared hour a courtroom in which silence is treated as confession.

Consider a tale from the annals of fame. Before his marriage, George Clooney could hardly stand in a frame beside a colleague without being assigned a romance by the tabloids; a red-carpet pairing or a shared coffee became “evidence.” His response over time was deliberate reserve—declining to let the gallery dictate the glossary of his life. The lesson travels well beyond celebrity: wherever the gaze is hot—small towns, tight circles, public vocations—the ordinary graces of companionship are taxed by speculation. The antidote is not hermitage but clarity: naming things as they are, and refusing the debt of other people’s assumptions.

There is also a gentler parable. Two students share rides to campus—their schedules coincide, the road is safer together. Soon, notes multiply in lockers; “Are you two…?” The friendship cools under the weight of the question. Only when they speak openly—“We’re friends; that’s the word, and we’ll keep using it”—does the frost begin to lift. Words, when used with courage, can be a hearth in a windy town. By naming a drive a drive, a meal a meal, they reclaim their peace from the taxation of rumor.

The saying teaches a double wisdom: responsibility and resistance. Responsibility, because if one does have a girlfriend, the heart is rightly answerable—not to the mob, but to the beloved. Resistance, because without such a bond, one owes no narrative to strangers; companionship needs no apology. The mature soul learns to carry both: to walk transparently before those to whom it has pledged truth, and to walk unburdened before those who have only presumed it.

Take from this a rule for the road and a few steady practices. (1) Let language lead: if it is dating, say so; if it is not, say that too—kindly, early, and without drama. (2) Guard the ordinary: keep space in your life for go out and hang that are not auditions for romance. (3) When rumors rise, answer once with simplicity, then let silence do its work; do not feed the theatre. (4) With a partner, agree on boundaries for public appearances, messages, and old friendships—honor the person to whom you are truly answerable. (5) Extend charity in your own looking; refuse to turn another’s movie, meal, or drive into a verdict. In such ways, we make a kinder square of the world, where friendship can breathe and love can speak for itself.