Adele has a song “rumor has it”, which tries to captured the mutable nature of rumors. I always get the last line wrong as to who is leaving who for whom, but one that popped in my head today was “rumor has it he’s the one I’m leaving me for”. I thought this quote apropos relative to a female friend of mine who is wrestling with her attraction to a narcissistic man who was quite awful. He was cheating on her, and trying to cheat on the woman he was cheating with. Some people are like that.
Corollary: it is sometimes appropriate to lie to others, but never to lie to yourself. I was going to publish that as a self declared bon mot, but will leave it here. I would call this my credo when it comes to the perceptual breathing portion of my “ethical” framework. Quotation marks because my ethics has no rules that govern anything but the inside of the individual’s head.