I consider myself a lucky person. Not because my life has always been easy, but because I’ve had the chance to live it on my own terms. I’ve lived in the places I wanted to live, done the jobs I wanted to do, travelled to places I dreamed of visiting, tried countless hobbies simply because I was curious, and met some truly extraordinary people along the way.

But if there’s one thing I feel luckiest about, it’s the people I’ve chosen to keep close.

There aren’t many of them. None of them are perfect, and neither am I. They all have flaws, they’ve all made mistakes, and we’ve all disappointed each other at some point. But they all have one thing in common: they’re real.

I don’t know exactly when honesty became so important to me. Maybe it happened because, for a long time, I lived in a world where lies were simply normal. They weren’t shocking. They were part of everyday life. When something becomes normal, you stop questioning it.

Then my life slowly changed. I started surrounding myself with people who weren’t perfect but who were honest. People who could tell me difficult truths instead of comfortable lies. And without even realising it, my idea of relationships changed completely.

Today I think I’m an incredibly open-minded person. I genuinely don’t care what shape a relationship takes. Friendship, love, monogamy, non-monogamy, long-distance, casual, lifelong… none of those things scare me. People should build the relationships that feel right to them.

The one thing I can’t build a relationship without is truth.

A while ago, someone entered my life who lied to me. It was the first time, after many years, that I found myself so close to someone who didn’t tell me the truth. What surprised me wasn’t the fact that someone had lied. It was how deeply it affected me. It felt as if I had been pulled back into a part of my life I thought I’d left behind forever.

That experience made me realise something I had never really put into words before. Lies don’t just damage trust. They destroy shared reality. A relationship only exists because two people are living inside the same story. The moment one person starts changing that story without the other’s knowledge, you’re no longer standing on the same ground.

And then something strange begins to happen. You stop simply listening and you start investigating. You replay conversations in your head. You compare different versions of the same story. You wonder whether your memory is wrong, whether you’re overreacting, whether you’ve misunderstood. Lies don’t just make you question someone else. They slowly make you question yourself.

And perhaps the cruellest part is that they don’t only change the present. They rewrite the past. Memories you once loved suddenly become uncertain. Moments that felt real begin to feel blurred. You start wondering which parts were true and which parts only existed because you didn’t know the whole story.

For a long time I thought the opposite of lying was simply telling the truth. I don’t think that anymore. I think the opposite of lying is peace. Because when you’re with someone who is honest, your mind finally gets to rest. You don’t have to investigate. You don’t have to decode. You don’t have to search for missing pieces.

You can simply live.

That’s why, today, honesty has become one of the very few things I consider non-negotiable. Not because I expect people to be perfect. But because I believe almost anything can be worked through if it’s real.

On truth, you can build almost anything.

On lies, sooner or later, everything collapses.