I am a 22-year-old guy and I still have a large group of friends from my school that get together when everyone is free. The group is around half a dozen or so people with about even girl to guy ratio. Recently, I started to notice that one of our friends (we’ll call him “Hank” for anonymity) hadn’t been around for a while.
He has a blue-collar job so he is around town year-round. Our group gets together in some capacity multiple times a week during winter/summer breaks, so after a few weeks of not seeing him I began to ask, “where’s Hank?”.
The reaction I got was like silence and No one would respond. After some pestering, I finally got one of my friends to admit, “Hank did something really bad, I wouldn’t inquire further…I wish I didn’t know. You’ll never find out.”
Now, clearly, I am not going to hang out with him due to something potentially awful that he did. Maybe murder, rape, drugs, who knows, but I do know that based on my friend’s reactions when I mention Hank’s name in casual conversation, at least 4 people know what happened. With that information, I feel I can safely say that most of them that know were not directly affected by Hanks’s actions.
Why then am I not allowed to know what happened? Am I supposed to continue to act naive about the whole thing, even though something seriously wrong happened? Is it morally wrong of me to ask my friends to give up a secret, that probably shouldn’t even be a secret? How would you guys go about seeking out this information in a way that’s not morally ambiguous? Are my friends protecting him by remaining silent?
Thanks for the help
Here are what netizens think:
- Have you tried googling his name, might have appeared in some newspaper before. If nothing pops up it’ll at least rule that out and you’ll know it was likely something more personal unless it was a crime that went unreported.
- If so many people know and not telling you, whatever your thinking is probably true.
- You’re probably just going to have to get enough of the story from Hank directly, to then get on the same page from others. Not a fun thing to do