Last summer, during one of my friend group's weekly "loitering sessions", our designated impressionist (ask him about his Bernie Sanders impression. It cracks me up every time) explained that he has learned to "expect [his] friends to disappoint [him]".

He said it in passing, about a situation he was working through with someone else, and the group moved on quickly. I did not.

For as long as I can remember, I have strived toward "goodness". My parents instilled this in me early, the way most parents do, and I received it with an earnestness that perhaps not everyone does.

And over years of conversation and forays into philosophical and religious texts, I assembled a moral framework for myself. It's not a particularly complicated one. In fact, it has just two central tenets: act with integrity, and try, in every action, to impart the least possible harm onto the people around you.

That is my working definition of a life conducted well.

I also believe—perhaps unfashionably—that we owe each other something simply by virtue of opting into a peaceful society with one another. Not grand sacrifices. But small ones, made constantly. Pick up after yourself. Return the favor. Participate. It's a social contract, of sorts. It's not particularly demanding—it asks only that we move through the world with the understanding that other people exist and matter and conduct ourselves accordingly.

So what do you do when you realize that some of the people around you have decided, quietly, that these things don't apply to them?

A person's character, I have come to believe, reveals itself not in its grandest expressions, but in its quietest ones—the ones nobody thinks to perform for. And there is a great deal you can learn, if you are paying attention, from the small cracks.

A lie about something inconsequential. Leaving a mess for someone else to clean. Taking and taking, while offering very little in return. These are not crimes. But they accumulate into a portrait of someone who is content with inhabiting a well-maintained community without ever troubling themselves to contribute to the maintenance themselves.

I find this personality type difficult to embrace. I'm not interested in being in close proximity to dishonesty or dereliction. I can't make peace with carelessness as though it were simply a personality quirk.

And in the relationships that matter to me, I will say something. In fact, I think this a hallmark of a bond that's rooted in mutual respect—this willingness to sit across from someone that you care about and say: here's what I observed, and here's how it landed. I think there's room, in most relationships worth keeping, for that conversation. And I think that what comes out of it—whether growth and understanding or the acknowledgment that two people are simply not aligned—is more valuable than silence.

Values, to me, are not negotiable. I can make room for someone's flaws. I have plenty of my own. But I cannot make room for a fundamental misalignment in how we think we ought to treat one another and the spaces we occupy.

And yet I keep asking myself whether I'm justified in holding the people closest to me to the standards that I hold myself to. I find myself returning to what my friend said constantly.

Should I expect less? Should I build disappointment into the architecture of my friendships from the outset? Should I accept it as a given and stop being startled when someone acts in their own interest at the expense of another's?

There's something almost freeing about that proposition.

But it also feels like giving up.

I'm not sure if expecting disappointment is wisdom and tolerance and acceptance or if it's a quiet rearrangement—one in which you've decided, before anyone has done anything, that people will let you down.

Maybe my friend is right. Maybe I'm wrong to hold the line. I genuinely don't know.

But I'm not ready to stop expecting more. At least not yet.