Some people I trusted lied to me recently, knowing full well that I would find out within a matter of days. I, of course, found out earlier because of the relationships I have built over time, and so it came back to me almost immediately that I had been lied to.

Clearly, I’m not going to trust those two people as much again, but I suspected them not telling me the truth because of their behavior. The confirmation only proves what I suspected: They are poor liars.

It wasn’t about something important enough to make a difference, but two things bothered me about it: First, they knew I would end up finding out and were dishonest anyway, and second, that they would risk a relationship built over years to be dishonest to me.

There are reasons people lie even over inconsequential things, and research has shown the most common reasons people lie, but it’s easy to go into the weeds with that and lose one’s bearings. It’s best to stick to the simpler aspects until more complex aspects present themselves – Occam’s razor.

Clearly I had valued the relationship more than they did, which is often the issue when it comes to forms of betrayal. If you value a relationship highly and the other values the relationship less than you expect, ‘betrayal’ is often what we feel. This is an important thing to know since I may have positional authority over them soon, particularly since as I have come to understand that they may have been instructed to lie by someone who will be an equal in the near future, which also tells me that the equal doesn’t see themselves as equal. They see themselves as above, and that does not bode well for any sort of relationship. Or maybe it’s just insecurity.

I tend to live my life openly and transparently. I value authenticity of people and provide the same. If I can’t say something because it might betray a trust, I say that or avoid being put in a position where I would have to say that. The people I try to surround myself with respect those sorts of boundaries, because if I invoke it for someone else, I will invoke it for them. Because of this, I have a small circle of people I call friends where the level of trust is high, and this could be because of my own attachment disorder as well; I understand I have one and have pushed back against it for some time. It’s hard to tell where it begins or ends. How one feels about a person isn’t always about the person.

This is pretty important to be able to work through. It seems like a life skill that we should pay more attention to, particularly in an age where people are having their text generated by algorithms trained on the output of what could be the most dishonest and delusional species on the planet.

In that regard and a few others, I am thankful for the dishonesty – it tells me who is not trustworthy over little things, and when they are not trustworthy over the little things, the big things are always suspect – for they are made of the little things.