I’ve received quite a few asks over the past 24 hours, so I’m going to make one final exception and answer this one. Because this anon simply happens to ask the question that’s sitting underneath many of the messages I’ve received.
Before I answer it, though, I want to say something important: everything I’ve written over the past months still stands! The Observer Files, the pattern analyses, the Leo & Mara series, the essays, the micro-observations … none of that has changed. In fact, everything I’m about to write here grows directly out of those observations. If you’ve been reading this blog from the beginning, you’ll probably recognise most of the pieces already. The difference is that, over time, those pieces have started fitting together more clearly.
Some people have asked whether Mara & Leo Part 4 is still coming. Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe one day, maybe not. Because, in a way, this has become Part 4. Not another story, but simply the place where all those observations currently come together.
So here’s where I’ve landed.
Observer files
Visible Enough
This anon gets remarkably close to the point where all our individual observations begin to converge. And if I really have to weigh the possibilities, I think controlled ambiguity is currently the strongest explanation.
I don’t believe this is primarily about protecting her. That argument becomes increasingly difficult to sustain when private birthday collages, Christmas photos, holiday pictures, profile images and little relationship markers repeatedly find their way into public fandom spaces. A private account with more than a thousand followers isn’t exactly a sealed family album either, especially when material from it regularly travels far beyond the original audience. If privacy were the central objective the system would look very different. There would be fewer images, fewer hints and far less material available for people to reconstruct.
What we have instead is something much more specific: she’s visible, but never clearly defined. People are allowed to see that she exists in his orbit. She appears at events, she’s occasionally tagged, private photos surface, and enough fragments are released for the connection to remain unmistakable. Yet the one thing that would make the entire situation straightforward never happens:
He doesn’t publicly name her as his partner.
He doesn’t refer to her naturally in interviews.
He doesn’t verbally place her in his present or future.
Even when he’s asked questions about relationships, family or the life he might want one day, he speaks as though he’s discussing a possible business opportunity that may or may not materialise.
That matters because, after 13 (!!!) months, this is no longer early caution. It has become the structure of the whole situationship.
At the beginning, it was reasonable to think he might simply need time. 3 months, 6 months, perhaps even longer, especially for someone who has historically been private. But eventually the burden of explanation begins to shift. When someone repeatedly shows a woman without ever naming her, allows the public to connect every dot while refusing to draw even one line himself, the silence stops being neutral. It becomes part of the communication.
That’s why I don’t think the most useful question is, “Why hasn’t he confirmed her yet?” The better question is, why does he keep this state of uncertainty alive?
Because the current arrangement is oddly convenient. He gets the visible benefits of appearing settled, mature and potentially family-oriented, while avoiding the commitment of publicly defining the relationship. The audience can see the woman and the child. They can construct the respectable domestic narrative for him. He doesn’t have to say it, defend it or explain it. And if the arrangement ever comes to an end, there is remarkably little to unravel. Most of his visible relationship markers have appeared in IG stories rather than permanent posts, disappearing automatically after 24 hours. The public is left with the impression, but very little remains as a lasting record.
That’s where I think the image question becomes important. I wouldn’t necessarily say that he sits down and consciously plans every element of this. Human behaviour is often much less organised than that. But I do think he accepts the advantages of the arrangement, and after more than a year of the same pattern, passive acceptance becomes a form of participation. He may not be directing every story, crop or collage, but he’s allowing a system to continue because, on some level, the system works for him.
For her, the same arrangement appears to work very differently. She receives visibility, status and proximity to his public identity, but not the one thing her behaviour seems to keep pushing towards: clear recognition. That’s why each new fragment feels like another attempt to move the boundary by half an inch. A profile picture appears, disappears and returns with a different crop. A holiday location becomes traceable through a supposedly casual story. A private image briefly surfaces and then travels into the fandom through another account. None of it is enough to define the relationship, but each small piece makes sure nobody forgets that she’s there.
This is where the “two scripts” (with thanks to @bcacstuff for that wonderfully simple metaphor) description becomes so useful.
His script appears to say: you may be visible, but I won’t define this publicly. Her script appears to say: if you won’t define it, I’ll leave enough visible evidence that nobody can ignore it.
And that, to me, explains a great deal of the disharmony people perceive. They’re not presenting one coherent public story, they seem to be pursuing different outcomes inside the same arrangement. She appears to want the visibility to mean something concrete. He appears content for it to remain suggestive, useful and undefined.
A fully public account would change that balance. It wouldn’t merely make her easier to find -- people already know who she is. But it would give her the ability to speak directly, display the relationship permanently, establish her own audience and become a public partner figure in her own right. She would no longer exist only through carefully dosed glimpses. She could own the narrative instead of pressing against its edges. (Seen from that perspective, the existence of the so-called “business account” becomes easier to understand. It provides the only public space through which she can establish any visible presence of her own.) And I’m not convinced that’s a development he actually wants.
His behaviour over the past 13 months suggests the opposite. He has allowed visibility, but withheld legitimacy. That distinction may sound harsh, but I think it’s accurate. She’s permitted to appear, but she isn’t publicly established.
The protection issue makes this even more striking. For more than a decade, Sam has shown us which parts of his private life he considers worth protecting. His family remains heavily shielded. His oldest friends have become less rather than more visible. People he once casually included in stories are now barely acknowledged publicly, even when they attend his events or travel with him. Those boundaries haven’t collapsed. If anything, they’ve tightened. Which is exactly why this particular exception stands out.
The woman publicly linked to him and, even more importantly, her child, would logically seem to belong to the most sensitive and protected area of his private life. Yet this is the area where the boundaries become strangely porous. Private photos circulate, family moments become fandom material, the child appears within public narratives, locations can be reconstructed. The relationship is simultaneously hidden and exposed.
As I wrote in my last post, I don't think this is primarily a question of what he feels. It’s a question of what he appears to consider worth protecting and what he doesn’t.
And this is where the image hypothesis returns. The arrangement gives him something. Perhaps it allows him to appear less like the permanently unattached playboy and more like a man moving into a mature, settled phase of life. Perhaps it softens certain parts of his public persona. Perhaps it supports a respectable family-oriented image without requiring him to live or publicly claim the full reality of that image. Whatever the precise internal motivation may be, the outward function is difficult to ignore. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s consciously “using” her in some cold, calculated way. I think the more accurate formulation is that he’s using the situation. He accepts what the situationship gives him while avoiding the one step that would give her equal public standing within it.
And she, in turn, appears to use the proximity, attention and status the arrangement gives her. So I don’t see one innocent party and one villain. I see two people receiving different benefits from the same unstable structure, while following different scripts and possibly expecting different endings.
The problem is that her side of the arrangement increasingly looks desperate. If you’re secure in your place, you don’t usually need to communicate through disappearing profile pics, cropped photos, indirect leaks and endlessly recycled hints. The more aggressively someone has to signal their position, the less secure that position begins to look. And once the audience can accurately predict the next move, the whole performance starts to become rather embarrassing.
That’s where we are now. People are already predicting what will happen at the MPC gala, the next public event, the next holiday or the next anniversary. They expect the same sequence: visibility, hints, photos, the expected excitement from those already invested in the narrative, no clear acknowledgement from him, then another round of speculation. The pattern has become so repetitive that it no longer feels spontaneous. And when a system becomes that predictable, it tells you something about the structure holding it together.
So, to answer anon’s question directly: I don’t think she remains private because Sam is carefully protecting her. If that were the goal, the evidence points to a remarkably ineffective form of protection. I think the ambiguity itself is the point, or at the very least the arrangement he has chosen to tolerate because it serves him.
She can be seen, but not fully recognised. She can participate, but not define the terms. The fandom can treat her as his partner, while he never has to use the word himself.
And after 13 months, I don’t expect that to change simply because another event, holiday or anniversary passes. People have spent the past year moving the imagined deadline forward: after Christmas, after filming, after Macbeth, after Mallorca .... you name it. But why would he suddenly change a model that currently gives him the advantages of public coupledom without requiring public commitment?
This is where all my previous observations currently come together. The boundaries, the narrative management, the lack of ordinary time, the separate scripts, the private images, the refusal to name the relationship and the repeated return to the same strange middle ground.
To me, this doesn’t look like a relationship gradually moving towards clarity. It looks like a situationship being kept deliberately, or at least conveniently, undefined.
I agree with you about his behavior and reasons. He likes undefined. But more and more I think she has her main IG private by her choice. Hear me out. I have never thought he prevents women from posting publicly, but likely warns them against it. We know most of the women he’s dated are public profiles.
Steph had always been public. She switched to private right after their first date and cleaned out her followers. I believe it’s because she knew her past was pretty shady and wanted to prevent as much of that from getting out, as possible. We know she deleted alot of things. She was probably hoping to move into this new relationship without her problematic past. I’m not talking about divorce and loosing a spouse. I’m talking about her patterns with men. Her repeated photo poses, her loving phrases the same on all of them. The timelines. Hoping we wouldn’t realize she isn’t an avid hiker, she bought the motorcycle for some reason she invented, weeks after Eoin’s death, and her liking all of Sam’s posts. Maybe she hoped we wouldn’t realize that all of her friends, were just Eoin’s. Just as she’s done with Sam. Unless you see her photos, would you know she followed these men everywhere too? Would you know she was an artist and musician, until she wasn’t? Would you know therapy wasn’t really her main thing until she got divorced, and then she met Eoin and it changed to him?
She’s probably backed herself into a corner because she wants to share her life with Sam but every time she leaks something, it’s just like a repeated pattern. We see it. I’m sure others that know her, see it. The question is why doesn’t Sam, or at least someone concerned? And that brings us back to what he gets out of it? This image IS helping him, for now.
I only check into the fandom once in a while now, so I'm not up on all the latest Sam gossip, but given that my memory of the fandom dates back to 2014-2015, I thought I'd share some thoughts.
ACTING AND PRIVACY. I was told once that part of why S tries to keep his personal life private is because as an actor he wants to be a blank slate that the audience can project onto when he acts. If they know too much about him, they will have a harder time "seeing" the character he is playing and letting their imaginations go regarding that character.
AMBIVALENCE ABOUT COMMITMENT: In Waypoints (2022), S admitted that he finds himself “bailing from relationships” before making a commitment out of fear that he could be like his father and hurt himself and someone else if he bailed after the commitment.
FERTILE GROUND FOR FANDOM PROJECTION: Regardless of the reasons, S seems to generally want to keep his private life private. So, I agree with @gotraveltheworldluv that S probably doesn't stop his SOs from posting about their relationships with him, but he most likely "warns" them against doing so.
But I imagine it would be very hard for any woman nowadays to avoid posting anything about her significant other on social media. Hence, S's past girlfriends would post lots of innuendo, which was ripe ground for fandom projection.
This inevitably has led to some of his fans pointing to the "inuendo" as "evidence" that the women S dated were "trolling the fandom," or "playing games," or just wanted "attention," or were "fake girlfriends." Basically, the kinds of potentially hurtful criticisms I see from time to time in my feed about his current girlfriend Steph.
What's also telling is that the fans' criticisms of each of S's girlfriends over the last 12+ years sound nearly THE SAME for each woman. This supports the probability that these criticisms are mostly just fan projections.
A BLAST FROM THE PAST: When S was dating MacKenzie (or MM), she was attacked mercilessly by certain fans. S actually did try to defend her a few times to no avail. But for those of you who weren't around in the earlier days of the fandom, here's an incident from the past that happened on Christmas Eve, 2016 on MM's IG.
It started with a fan making a nasty comment on MM's IG, and S jumping in and defending MM by calling the comment "pathetic." (Sorry, I don't recall what the fan said because they quickly deleted the comment.)
After S added, "Be the positivity in the world you want to see. This woman is.x," a shipper, outlanderlover2013, jumped in and responded to S's comment. This is the exchange between them that followed:
IMHO it was outrageous that a fan who didn't personally know MM or any of S's girlfriends had the gall to try to "educate" S about MM's "pattern of innuendo," and how it was like Abbie's and Cody's "patterns."
Speculation can be fun, until it becomes potentially hurtful speculation about people (especially noncelebrities like Abbie or Steph) whom fans don't actually know.
SAM ISN'T FAMOUS ENOUGH TO SPEND THE TIME AND EFFORT "PLAYING" ALL THESE "GAMES": Outlander is over, and S is NOT very well known outside the show. Unfortunately for his fans, Outlander will probably be the high point of his career. He is certainly not famous enough to need to put a lot of time and effort into manufacturing "fake girlfriends" or playing complicated "games," or spinning "narratives" that present a better public image for the few thousands (NOT millions) of fans who continue to care about his personal life.
Still, back in 2016, Sam was clear as to what he thought about the endless fan speculation about the women he dates:
“Several thousand people have no idea what they're talking about. 😁 Merry Xmas!”
________________ Photo source (before edits/caption)
