"Never violate a trust you want to keep."
- John's third law
This has been a pretty lousy year. Certainly the lousiest in modern times. It started with my dog, Ed, dying a year ago next week, and then things got unpleasant. The reasons are several, but if I had to narrow it down to one theme, it would be that this thought prevails: "Gosh, that sounded an awful lot like a lie."
People lie all the time. I do too.
"I'm fine," I tell the cashier.
"What a lovely vase. That really makes the room," I tell the new acquaintance in lieu of projectile vomiting in said vase.
"So-and-so is really producing," I tell management.
These aren't the sort of lies I'm talking about. These are part of the background noise of living in polite society. I don't look for 'em, and I don't notice 'em. But when a loved one starts monkeying with pronouns and timelines, I notice. When their overexplanations puree credibility, I notice that too. Mostly, I notice that my intelligence is being insulted.
What do you do in those situations? My philosophy has always been self-elimination. Take Poor Sarah. I noticed her evasions about Rich well into last year. Smoke and fire, as the saying goes, tend to have a 1:1 correlation. And there was smoke aplenty, most of it being channeled directly through my sphincter. But I didn't try to catch her in the lies. I was still trying to make it work, and I don't see any kind of relationship surviving the breach of trust it would take to catch her. So even though I thought she was lying to me, and even though history proved that hypothesis correct, I let events take their course. I gave her my trust, daring her to be worthy of it. I let her self-eliminate. Sensible, no?
Then how come I still feel like a sucker?
When the end came with Sarah, it came abruptly and after several intensely wonderful weeks. She offered no explanation beyond "It is what it is," and I was desperate to get my head around the swift turn of events. Only one explanation fit the facts, and several awful hours into the conversation, I finally asked about it. "Is this about Rich?"
"No." Silence. Painful, suspicious silence. I tried to encourage her to come clean for once in her life.
"Because it would make it a lot easier on me if it were," I said.
"Really?"
"Yes. Because it would make a modicum of sense."
Silence.
And thus did Sarah opt to throw me into a torturous, sleepless, two-month spiral of doubt and second-guessing. A simple sentence would have spared me, but she'd rather protect her rep, I guess, than another human being's psyche. And when I finally broke down, violated her trust and confirmed what I already knew, it was like a switch was thrown inside me. Pain, gone. Click.
Thanks heaps, Sarah. Thanks for working so hard to deny me this peace of mind.
That's what I really hold against her. I'd always kinda expected her to cheat. Appearances notwithstanding, that's clearly who she is. But I didn't expect her to sacrifice my mental well-being just to protect her image. Criminal selfishness, that.
Now healed, I cynically wonder about the implications for my future. Is the lesson here "spy earlier?" Does verifying stories equate to relationship death, as I've always assumed, or can it actually be a constructive means of affirming character? And most of all, where's the line between honoring a trust you want to keep and being a trusting fool?