Beliefs are first and foremost, private and personal, and so the communication of beliefs is quite honest. When you convey your ideas honestly, you include the data, but also the heart-felt emotion associated, and are taking a bit of a risk with the audience in so doing. This makes honesty a virtue, because you are being constructive and win/win in offering your ideas to others, some of which may be beneficial to them, and to you. But in choosing the wrong audience or wrong composition of the audience for your message, you may be misunderstood, or worse, unfairly criticized or attacked by them for your ideas.

Communication can be looked at in various ways. Simply put, it is an expression of ideas that also likely carry emotional energy as well. This makes them similar to beliefs, which have the same structure, but the difference is that beliefs are contained within us, sometimes unconsciously, until expressed to others in communication.

What makes honesty unique as a character virtue, is that it illuminates something that you think is important, which others may think the same of. Consider it as only affecting certain others and not others who may or may not take well to the impression, because various factors. In this sense, it needs the intuition and conscience of solid, mature decision-making in selecting the right audience for the message, and also needs the Observing Ego necessary to match their needs and receptiveness. This makes sense, because any virtue has constructive, non-narcissistic aspects, and both mature decision-making balanced in conscience and intuition, as well as Observing Ego, the mature psychological feature.

From Aristotle's Golden Mean, we learn that every virtue also has two vices. In the case of honesty, the vice of excess is having Transparency at best, and Bluntness at worst, which describes an over-estimation of the ability of others to digest and positively use the information in the honesty. Such sayings as, "You can't handle the truth," come to mind. On the other hand, the vice of deficit in honesty can be called, "Chicanery," which is a "dumbing down of communication for the purpose of gaining advantage over others."

We might then often see a couple have a falling out, because there was a lack of trust between the partners. This is given rise by either the experience of having intuition of their own. They pick up on a discomfort in themselves at being given too much access to your private experiences ("Too much information - TMI - comes to mind.) Alternatively their intuition you underestimated senses that something is "wrong" in your communication in terms of your ethics, that you have a chicanerous, alterior motive in your communication, and their "bullshit detector" is picking up on something not trustworthy and honest about you.

Honesty has bearing on our performance in phase three - intellectual attraction - step eight, where we seek to amplify the best virtues toward our goals.

RETURN TO CHARACTER COMPATIBILITY

Honor is a combination of the skill of curiosity with the trait of beliefs. Curiosity, you may remember, is largely composed of the core psychological skill of Observing Ego, paired with an educated eye, full of "left brain" ability for detail, history, and organization. Beliefs, you may recall, pertain to ideas that we deem to be true and valid, and yet carry such a large degree of emotion in them, that they are valued by us, and become such a part of our decision-making strategies, that they are far more than just ideas. We think of them as "truths" in part, because they also emerge as a function of our very identity. Honor has bearing on our performance in phase three - intellectual attraction - step eight, where we seek to amplify the best virtues toward our goals.

There is a psychiatric phrase for describing two people who operate outside of “reality” - which is to say that they “make each other psychotic” by way of encouraging irrational beliefs in each other. It’s called, “Folie a Deux,” which translates to something like “foolishness for two.”

Our beliefs, as we have said, are our “worldview” or sense of “reality.” When a couple gets together and are very agreeable to most of what their partner says, we find that they may end up giving each other erroneous feedback about the world around them. It is inaccurate “reality testing,” which leaves them more confused in being together than in being alone and single. This is the intellectual experience of “codependence,” in which the couple lives on a sort of socially isolated island unto themselves. Forced to "have the same beliefs" without ever really examining them, based on the actual results of the past.

Many a couple in a more codependent mode will feel  this way - in this “psychosis for two.” One is put upon by the other partner, intimidated into agreement with most of what they say. Some people even make this “distasteful agreeableness,” the measure of relationship success: “We never fight. We never disagree. We are always in harmony.” Which is in and of itself, awful boundaries.

They make the relationship an intellectual prison of their own building, the blocks that form the walls made of the absence of curiosity, and the mortar between them made of prejudice and ignorance. They are blind to seeing their constant agreement as the real impediment to love lasting for a lifetime, because the soul of all people will eventually declare itself as existent, one’s own world, and secondly, unique, even in the arms of another. Their “distasteful agreeableness” is a powder keg which will most assuredly explode someday, probably when they would have been better served to have a strong partnership in the face of an obstacle.

We need to remember that like any virtuous psychological trait that falls on the Golden Mean, there is also a correseponding set of two vices - one of excess, which is Nostalgia, and one of deficit, which is the state of being Unsentimental. Instead of agreeing with everything the other says, they both need to have the honor to help each other correct their own, faulty beliefs, through a sense of curiosity about the results of the past, not hostility or resentfulness about it.

In this way, they may naturally counter the "Pollyanna" effect of Nostalgia - whitewashing the past, to pretend that everything has always been all nice and perfect, and causing them to miss the crucial lessons of failure (how can we improve as a couple in the future if we never objectively look at the past, honorably, and to honorably correct it in a spirit of kindness.) This move also works on the overly, exceedingly optimistic belief systems of both partners.

Likewise, if we don't counter what is utterly unsentimental, and essentially pessimistic about one or both partners, by honoring the truth of the past, that it really wasn't all bad, and to see even those failures as a chance to balance out into more optimism than pessimism about it all. To use boundary doors on the couple's history, to honorably look at and correct the failures of the past, but also to honor the successes as a foundation on which to build.

When thinking of using this character virtue in yourself, or seeing it in others, you need to remember that it is just as easy to find someone so nostalgic, that they don't get anything productive done, in themselves, or in service of the relationship. You can see how directly it is, that curiosity operating on our beliefs as a couple, to keep them balanced between too much optimism versus too much pessimism, really is honoring the other person, and our individual and shared, "pasts." It is in this curious, fair, kind way that we prevent each other from being "revisionists" who "twist the past" in arguments, into what it really wasn't, so that we can have an honestly successful joint future.

RETURN TO CHARACTER COMPATIBILITY

Hope and Faith - both can be used for good or bad or from either optimism or delusion. Where both lead to free willed decisions: they are the mirror reflection inside the boundary of the equal statistical potential of the random good and bad outside the boundary of what can either hurt or help us.

So it must come down to assessing stats of what’s coming our way using intuition but because it’s not an action (it’s a thought that requests the world provide us something and do the action we need but can’t do) then it doesn’t need outer- directed conscience or ethics.

So it must in its best use be a kind of conscientiousness toward ourselves, an optimizing of our own function in times when we can’t act to solve something. A kind of self-soothing with a good intention such that we live to fight another day. 

When we have boundary with no holes we don’t need faith or hope. The faith and hope is in the boundary and we are solid and certain we are safe.

However it might be the “planning phase” of fixing a boundary hole, a place of vulnerability and therefore helpless actionlessness where we need protection at least mentally and it’s a guide to eventual action when conditions are right and resources available.

We’d better then act when we get the chance.

Then the hole is repaired when we say NO to something and take new action in new directions.

It was the hope or faith that helped us warm up then save ourselves.

Now we believe in ourselves and can have faith in our own competence, beneficence and skill and feel more secure and contributory to the world.