Trust the honest, not the kind

Everyone would like to always be both honest and kind. No one is.

The truth is sometimes to be kind means to be dishonest and viceversa. I’ll give you an example: imagine a friend invites you to dinner, at first you agree but when the day comes, you realize you don’t really want to. Maybe you want to go out with another friend or you just can’t be bothered to get out of the bed. This happens to everyone and it’s fine. The question is: what do you tell your friend?

You could choose the honest way and tell them you don’t want to go out because you’re lazy. This will probably anger them since it’s quite unpolite. You could instead be kind and just say you caught a cold or a really important deadline coming up; your friend wouldn’t be angry at all this time, but you would have lied to them. Is it possible to be both honest and kind in this situation? Unfortunately no.

Now, imagine you’re the friend, who would you trust the most of this two people? the one telling you they can’t be bothered to go out with you or the other telling you they would really have loved to see you but unfortunately caught a bad cold? Most people would say the second one, without a single doubt. After all, why would you trust someone that does not want to go out with you?

Sometimes kindness can hide dishonesty, meanwhile can honesty hide unkindness? This is not an easy question at all. The way I see it, the answer is no. Being honest means hiding nothing from the other person. You can be unkind while being honest, of course, but there is no way to hide it without becoming dishonest. For example: let’s say that you eventually go to dinner with your friend, when you meet them they ask you: “How do I look?”, you look at their shirt and it’s probably the most horrendous shirt you’ve ever seen.

If you tell them they look amazing, you’re lying. You’re being dishonest with them but they don’t know it. You’ll see there is no way to be unkind and honest without them finding out. If you were to tell them they look ke a garbage can, you would be both honest and unkind but they would know about it.

These were a few reasons why it’s important to trust people who are honest, even if sometimes they’re unkind, rather then people who are kind. Because whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.