Dear Daughter, We Are Nothing Without Trust and Integrity
Life is complicated. We all make mistakes. Trust and integrity are crucial in any relationship!
Dear daughter,
Today, I want to talk to you about integrity.
“Without integrity, we are nothing!” your dad.
In this modern age, no one has a bloody spine anymore. Everybody cheats on everyone. There is no more loyalty, not to your family, not to your friends, and not to your lovers.
Once trust is lost, hell begins.
Divorces are piling up, and children are growing up without a safe, warm, two-parent environment to help them grow into emotionally mature adults. It used to take a village to raise kids, but now they don’t even have two parents anymore — a tragedy with untold ramifications.
Listen, I know that “shit happens.” We’re not always at our best, and sometimes, we end up being the ones who get betrayed. I get it. I do. And while we cannot control other people, we are solely responsible for our choices and actions.
I always laugh at people with shady paths who complain and play the most wounded victims once karma finds their number, and they end up on the receiving end of cheating and betrayal. Internally, not outwardly, because that would be cruel.
“You reap what you saw,” baby girl. Never forget this!
If you’ve been breaking hearts and sleeping with everyone, you shouldn’t expect a happy, long-lasting relationship once you finally decide to settle down. Whether the other people knew of your betrayals or not is irrelevant. You knew, and karma knew.
You wouldn’t believe how shocked and insulted the most sleazy and disloyal people are when they get cheated on, lied to, or betrayed. I’m often left shell-shocked at how naive and stupid they are.
“What goes around, comes around,” darling.
A man has nothing if he has no honor. Very few honorable men or women are out there these days. Everything is about immediate gratification, pleasure, passion, and a “me, mine, for me” mentality. When we stop caring about other people, others stop caring about us.
“Do not do to others what you don’t want done to you.”
That is yet another rule that you really should engrave into your mind. It doesn’t matter if all other people do something. It doesn’t matter if everybody cheats. It doesn’t matter if everyone lies. Leave others to their misery!
You are responsible only for yourself.
Just because others are irresponsible, disloyal, cheating assholes, that doesn’t mean you have been given the green light for this sort of behavior yourself. Be better! Do better! Demand better from yourself and the people closest to you.
The problem with lying and cheating is not in the act itself. Sex can be just a fling and mean nothing. But that’s not the point!
Once trust is lost, hell begins.
The person you choose to be with is supposed to be the one you trust and who should be able to trust you with everything. Once that trust is lost, once the basic premise of the relationship is broken, all is lost.
There is no happy relationship, much less marriage, without trust and loyalty unless mutually agreed upon, and I’m not even sure of that. I’m not a fan, but I also don’t like to judge people who choose this sort of life for themselves (open relationships). The keywords are “choose” and “mutual agreement”!
My darling girl, life is full of challenges, setbacks, and disappointments, and personal relationships contain many of them. But it’s also what makes life worth living.
If you’re ever betrayed or cheated on, leave, and don’t look back!
Respect yourself. That person didn’t respect you enough to deny themselves the brief pleasure of a good shag. They chose a few minutes, maybe hours, of passion and physical pleasure over everything you were building together. They made a bad call, so to hell with them. As far as I’m concerned, the shagging isn’t the issue; it’s the betrayal of trust that is the thing you cannot come back from.
A life of jealousy, emotional dependency, resentment, and humiliation is no life at all.
You, my darling girl, deserve better! Other people can be slimy, disloyal worms without integrity and spine, but from you, dear daughter, I expect more.
Not only will a mistake like this impact how you feel about yourself forever, it is almost guaranteed to ruin the relationship you’ve built and hurt the person you were supposed to love the most. There are monsters out there, but it’s one thing to hurt people you don’t know and something much more vile to deliberately hurt the person who is supposed to mean the most to you just because you feel like it. Be better! Do better!
Still, I get it; shit happens.
The truth is that we are all bloody under our skin. We all make mistakes. We all fall in love, even if we don’t want to. We all get caught in a moment of passion. We are, after all, only human.
You should always keep this in mind. Given the right person in front of you and the right set of circumstances, and no matter how strong you are or how much you love your partner, things can happen. It’s best to avoid such situations in the first place.
- Don’t travel around with your boss and sleep in hotels on the other side of the world, especially if you even minusculely like them.
- Don’t get drunk in mixed company; it will lower your guard.
- Don’t end up in situations where you are left alone with someone you like while in a relationship with someone else.
It’s not rocket science. Prevention solves almost every situation before it even gets there. Excuses after the fact mean nothing, and you know it.
If you like someone and want to be with them, just be honest with yourself and don’t string people along.
Things happen. You meet someone and fall instantly in love. Relationships grow cold and distant. Life happens to us all. Break up with your current partner, and follow your heart. There is nothing wrong with that; just don’t lie and cheat!
There is a right way to do this and a wrong way.
Choose the right way, always. Not because of what benefits you will get from it or to escape karma serving it all back to you someday. Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do! You need no other reason.
What if the mistake has already been made?
What’s done is done. You will have to live with it and suffer the consequences of your actions, as do we all.
If you’re lucky, you’ve betrayed only two people. The partner you loved and yourself. If children and families are involved, you’ve inadvertently caused havoc in their lives as well. It will mark your kids for the rest of their lives. Teach by example, show them what a good life looks like. What integrity means. Don’t tell them what a good person is, be one, and they’ll learn.
Anyhow, a mistake has been made. Now what?
Come clean. Integrity can also be shown by being honest about one’s vulnerabilities and mistakes. A person with integrity will own up and won’t hide his mistakes. It is what it is — now is the time to deal with the aftermath!
Reconcile if you want, although I don’t think a relationship can come back from this, not in its pure form. Once trust is lost, hell begins. So let go, make peace with the situation, and try to forgive yourself.
The betrayed person will never trust you again, and rightfully so. I never trusted anyone I knew who cheated or routinely lied to others. It shows their true colors, and you can never unsee it.
It might be worth considering sticking together if children are involved, but only if you are both fully committed to making it happen. It’s no easy task, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a truly saved partnership after such a betrayal.
Absolute forgiveness, nothing less will do.
If you hope to save a relationship where the most essential ingredient has been lost — trust- you must be willing to completely and fully forgive the other person (the cheater). Like it never happened. Erase that memory from your mind. There can be no resentment, no holding on to power over the other person, no jealousy and doubt.
Trust must be assumed all over again, which is no easy thing. If you can’t do that, let it go and move on.
Both partners must have open, vulnerable, and raw talks about what brought them here and what is the right way forward now. Talk like adults, and whatever you decide — make it final. It’s all or nothing. Everything else just prolongs the pain.
It’s always best to take the first pain, while direct and unavoidable than to drag it down further. Face the music head-on, be what may! Get your life back on track as soon as possible.
The person who cheated must also make a total commitment, realize and understand the reason for his transgression, and show honest remorse. Mistakes happen, and good people do bad things. It’s possible that this person still loves you and is genuinely committed to your relationship. Possible, not probable, though.
So, if you ever decide to accept a cheater back into your life, you had better make sure that they realize what was done and are willing to do everything to fix things.
I need to make one more critical distinction on this topic. There are different kinds of cheating.
- There’s the one-time, drunken mistake, never to happen again, kind of cheating.
- And then there is the emotionally involved, prolonged, hidden relationship kind of cheating.
You may get over the first, but not the second kind! Emotional cheating is a lot worse than purely physical cheating. The result may seem outwardly the same, but if you’ve developed feelings toward the other person, you’re screwed.
My darling girl, life is full of challenges, setbacks, and disappointments, and personal relationships contain many of them. But it’s also what makes life worth living. Love is the answer to a lot of life’s burning questions, perhaps even the most fundamental of them all, the one about life’s purpose.
If you can get this part of your life right, everything else won’t matter. But if you fail to build good relationships, no matter what else you may be successful at, you’ll never be happy and at peace.
Trust, honesty, and integrity are fundamental to any relationship.
Without them, we have nothing. Without love and the people that we love in our lives, we have no life at all. If you have to focus on one thing that will impact your life and happiness the most, it’s this. I have said my peace.
I love you, Dad.
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