
Maybe that’s all a relationship is: showing up, then continuing to show up. It’s suppressing whatever’s weirdest about you until you can safely reveal yourself. It’s opening yourself up to the possibility that this could go pretty wrong, because there’s also the slight chance you could end up “over the moon.” It’s accepting that you, even you, are not so cool that you can’t get excited about showing up for someone great. And I am excited, but not because I’m engaged; I’m excited because I’m engaged to someone I actually like, and after years of dating people I had lukewarm feelings for I had stopped considering this a possibility.
In modern Russia, the administration is comfortable using lies to muddle their people. If you push out several completely contradictory stories, the truth becomes buried, or at least discredited along with the other clearly untrue stories. If you make an effort to shed doubt on the news outlets, NGOs, and individuals who use facts to show when a statement is demonstrably untrue then it becomes harder for people to settle on one single statement as being true, in amongst a series of statements that are not. People are naturally inclined to trust authority, so when the government makes an official statement it carries weight against an individual or single news outlet.