I like to think I’m a pragmatic type of person, that is to say, I like knowing things to devise appropriate actions to take. However, this view of myself didn’t come right away… it never does.

On a day preceding an oncoming summer break, my friends and I were prepping for yet another house party to celebrate surviving yet another year. This wasn’t a public house party, just one for this specific circle of people; a circle I was in.

Planning for a party should be relatively simple, especially if it’s been done before, right? It’s not rocket science to pick a place, food, drinks, events, and then call it a day. We’re students, so it’s not like we’ve got schedules to shuffle around, summer’s coming up. In the process of this, I read a pretty innocuous comment in the party planning chat.

“Oh, someone else helped me plan this”

Now, I have to apologize because I’ve deceived you a bit. I called the members of this circle “friends” but the relationship dynamics between each of us go way deeper than that. There have been betrayals, apologies, people leaving, people coming back, and secrets kept within the whispers of a few members. I do believe each person individually is good enough to be called a “friend”, but navigating the dynamics of the group is asking to be lost in a mirror maze where you never learn anything.

Back to that innocent statement though. I pressed for the identity of “someone” because I truly believed it would turn up a simple answer. Can you blame me? My first guess was just someone in the group, but this wasn’t the case. Instead, I was faced with an evasive answer.

“Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing”

This leads me to worry, because an answer like this rules out the safest answers to the question I asked. It can’t be someone in the group because they’d say the name. It can’t be a surprise visitor because they’d say it’s a surprise. So that means it’s someone else that they don’t want to tell us about. I tell them that this can and will go wrong if they don’t reveal who it is or any information about them. The group is fragile enough as is and I can feel in my bones that this can only turn up tails if the coin is flipped.

But there is no response.

I don’t need to tell you the rest.

It blew up, like I predicted. The party’s off now. The friend group is completely broken. And the question I was asked after the fact?

“Would you rather I lie to you?”

Honestly… yes.

Ever since that moment in time, I’ve solidified my opinion that you should be all or nothing with your information. By leading me on with a mystery “someone”, I was able to deduce that something bad would happen, I told them it would happen, I watched it all set up, and I didn’t change anything. I had to spend the days afterwards with a feeling of “I could’ve changed that” when I could’ve been living an easy life had that friend kept their mouth shut and lied to me.

Lies are bad, sure.

But leading people on with information you’ll never give out?

Far worse.