Some loyalty looks like refusing to make a private difficulty into a public story.

Other people’s hard patches are interesting, and repeating them rarely feels like betrayal in the moment. It arrives as concern, as context, as something worth mentioning to explain a situation. But the person going through it loses control of who knows, and finds themselves met with sympathy from people they never chose to tell.

When you know something difficult about someone, decide that it stops with you unless they say otherwise. If you need to talk about how it is affecting you, do that without the identifying details.