Right Isn’t Always Right

“I’ll give you a few days to tell your wife, but know that I have every intention of talking to my friend.”

I hated this place. I was pissed they even brought me here without my consent, but it wasn’t my first visit. I already knew what I needed to do.

If you’re close with both people in a relationship and one betrays the other, do you tell? Do you keep quiet?

We ask, "What is the right thing to do?"

I require loving relationships of myself. I‘ve learned to ask “What’s the loving thing?”

The loving thing is the thing that gives everyone what they’re owed, including yourself:

• The betrayer gets a chance to tell their own story
• The betrayed gets to learn the truth from the person they want to hear it from
• I get to honor my integrity instead of harboring a secret that doesn’t belong to me.

Doing the loving thing is easy when it’s easy. There is no moral dilemma to offering a hug to soothe a loved one’s tears. We get to learn our true capacity for love when loving becomes hard. When we notice that loving isn’t immune to cause and effect. That loving can come with consequence and suddenly this terrifies us.

In situations like this, we like to confuse the loving thing with the easy things.

Maybe the easy thing is playing hero to the victim. Telling the betrayed ourselves without giving our other friend a chance to come clean. This gives us an easy out on being a “bad guy”.

I do not believe it's a loving option.

Now you’ve betrayed the trust of one friend's confidence, while stealing the betrayed’s chance to hear it from their partner first. To be their own hero in how they receive and respond to the news. Further, you’ve robbed the betrayer of the chance to do the right thing now. To correct course on their transgressions, which could repair their connection with their own integrity and repair their relationship.

Playing hero was my go-to option when I was more concerned with doing the “right” thing than the loving thing. I’ve since realized that making a scapegoat of someone to serve my moral high ground doesn’t feel loving, to me.

“Right” isn’t always right.

Or maybe the easy thing is the enabling thing. Keep quiet and let them figure it out. It’s none of your business, even though it haunts you when you’re with the betrayed. You catch yourself avoiding eye contact. Smiling with a touch of pity, because some part of you knows that now they're betrayed by their partner and you. Their friend.

How you respond to this is your business, and pretending otherwise to avoid conflict also doesn’t feel loving, to me. 

The easy thing isn't the loving thing in these moments because love is not here to always be easy. Love is not here to forgive our debts. Sometimes love’s job is to show us we’re strong enough to pay them. Sometime’s love’s job is to develop our wisdom so we may to choose debts worth paying moving forward, after realizing the debts of betrayal isn’t one of them.

If you grew up keeping secrets to keep peace, this may feel wrong to you. It’s through healing the trauma of playing secret keeper that we get to embrace this wisdom.

In the situation above, I want to be clear:

I do not make a habit of minding other peoples’ business. I am not the relationship police. It brings me no joy to have power here. Only angst because I detest the labor of being called to love this way.

My business here is that of my own integrity and the role I play in my relationship with the betrayed. I cannot enable anyone to abuse my capacity for guilt. No one gets to use me as a vault for their betrayals of people I care about, including the people I care about. 

In this moment I have to figure out how to be loving to myself, the betrayed, and yes - the betrayer.

It is not loving to help the betrayer toss more bones in their closet. It is loving to help them face their truth, carry it through, and learn to honor it responsibly. Doing otherwise would cause me, in turn, to hide from my own truth. To co-conspire in the loss of integrity I’m now at risk of sharing with them. Eroding the safety, the clarity, the respect, the agency we all deserve to feel in relationship with one another. With ourselves.

The cop out would be an easy thing to do, but it wouldn’t be a loving thing to do. For me or them or anyone else.

And while loving has its consequences - so does doing the unloving thing. I choose the love that grows us.

Because when we choose loving in integrity, we can face ourselves in the mirror and we can look them in the eyes tomorrow. We can invite them to meet our gaze. All our bones are in the open and I can still pour you a drink. Now you can know you belong here. We can work toward safety again. We can let what haunts us come to surface and we can let it go and move forward, together.

If you’re up for it. That part is up to you. I feel settled in my choice to let the loving thing be the right thing, for me.

It has been difficult but it has yet to fail me. Only lovelessness has done that, with its secrets and shame and emotional blackmails. Chipping away at our spirits and our relationships. Loving clears this trash out, allowing us to build ease in what's left: truth, wisdom, and the realization that the love feels cleaner after it’s all brought to light.

Rooting for You,

Tori

P.S. If you’d like more people to ask “what’s the loving thing?” please share this article on social media and with people you think it would resonate with.