Be Careful About the People Who Cheer You On Publicly

mountain range with road and trees in the forefront

There’s a particular kind of person we’ve learned to recognize. They’re the first to comment on your news. They show up in your notifications with fire emojis and "so proud of you!!" and “this is EVERYTHING,” typed in the unmistakable dialect of public adoration. And then, the moment the audience disappears — the moment it’s just the two of you, no likes to rack up, no algorithm watching — they go radio silent. No text or call when things get hard. No call when the chips are down. Just silence, waiting for the next thing worth applauding in public.

I don’t think this makes someone a bad person. I think it makes them a person who has confused being seen supporting you with actual support. And honestly, the culture we’re in has made that confusion easy to fall into. Public cheering has a return on investment. It’s visible, it’s quick, it costs nothing but a few seconds and a well-chosen emoji, and it lets someone signal — to you, but really to everyone watching — that they are the kind of person who shows up for people.

Private support has no fanfare. Nobody sees the phone call where you talked someone off a ledge at 11 p.m. Nobody screenshots the friend who drove across town with soup. There’s no engagement metric for showing up when it’s inconvenient and nobody’s watching, which is exactly why it tells you so much more.

I’ve started paying closer attention to the gap between the two. Not out of cynicism, but because I think it’s one of the more useful diagnostics we have for figuring out who’s really in our corner. The people who are loud in public and silent in private aren’t necessarily lying when they cheer for you — the enthusiasm is often real... in the moment.

What’s telling is what it costs them. Public support costs nothing. It’s the private moments that ask something of a person: time, discomfort, the willingness to sit with you in a mess that isn’t photogenic. And that’s where you find out who was rooting for you, and who just liked being associated with your win to shift the spotlight to them.

You see this play out well beyond social media, In workplaces, in friend groups, in the quiet aftermath of a hard stretch. The people who post the congratulatory comment when something great happens aren’t necessarily the ones who return your call when the thing falls apart, or who actually show up when it might cost them something. Publicly cheering for someone’s success is low-risk. Privately standing behind someone through a mess — showing up, defending them when they’re not in the room, sitting with them in something unglamorous — is a different commitment entirely. It’s worth noticing which of your people only show up for the highlight reel.

None of this means you should distrust every public compliment or write off cheerful comments as hollow. Most are somewhere in the middle — capable of both real private care and reflexive public enthusiasm. Not every relationship in your life needs to hold up under 2 a.m.-phone-call conditions scrutiny to hold its place in your life. Not everyone in your life owes you that depth, and that’s fine. The problem isn’t that someone is a public-only supporter. The problem is mistaking that person for someone they’re not — leaning on them for something they were not actually offering, and being surprised, and hurt, when the silence shows up right on schedule.

Watch what happens when there’s no audience. Watch who reaches out after the applause dies down, after the post has been up for a day and stopped getting likes, after the hard part starts. Watch who asks a real question instead of leaving a real-sounding comment. That’s where you’ll find your actual people — not in the volume of the cheering, but in what someone is willing to do when there’s nothing in it for them but you.

Be careful about the people who only cheer you on where it’s visible. But be a little more  grateful for the ones who show up where it isn’t.