On Lying

Lying is such an interesting behavior, because we all do it even though it is perhaps one of the first habits that our parents teach us is wrong. When you are young, you just know that lying is wrong and that if you lie to your parents you will be in double trouble: first for the transgression and then for the lie. I learned early and definitively that it was best to be in only one kind of trouble with my parental units, especially as I sensed their disappointment in me for being untruthful. I could live with the guilt of smacking my sister in the face and getting busted; I could not live with the disappointment in my parents voices when they found out I was lying to their faces (and doing a convincing job of it to boot) about having started the melee to begin with.

As we get older, we realize that there are nuances to lying. There is the Social Nicety lying, such as “I love your dress!” or “Have you lost weight!?” as well as “Oh I can’t make it tonight; I”ve got to shampoo my hair.” There is the Saving of Feelings lying, “It’s not you; it’s me.” These are socially acceptable in many circumstances and in fact contribute to civil human relations in our society.

In the other corner, there are the lies that are never okay, but that sometimes masquerade as the benign lies outlined above. There is the good old outright A**-Saving lying such as, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman--Miss Lewinsky” or “I did not smack my sister in the face for no reason.” There is the Actively Evil Narcissistic lying such as, “I would never sleep with your sister/friend/a random woman on my vacation and then come home and sleep with you! I love you!” There is the Avoidance lying such as, "I was out with friends last night {one of whom is a woman I plan to dump you for as soon as she gives the signal}" or finding ways to not mention that you have a girlfriend, even if it means leaving out entire sections of anecdotes and details about your life in conversations with others.

I’m sure I’m missing a whole slew of categories, like Diplomatic lying which countries do every minute, and Insecure lying, which people tend to do on internet dating sites as if the person will never find out that you don’t actually own a dog or have an athletic build. Any others I'm missing?

By the time we reach adulthood, I think we have all found ourselves in situations where someone in our life just can’t help him or herself, and simply lies all the time about matters great and small. On one level, it is unfortunate for them, because it shows that they don’t possess the confidence in themselves or the faith in you to hear the truth and be okay with it. Even if they are telling you something really terrible, in my case at least, I’d always just prefer to know the truth and work toward a solution from there. On another level, having a friend lie to you constantly can only make you feel disrespected and expendable. After all, if a friend can’t trust you enough to be honest with you and know that you will still love them, if perhaps a bit angry at them, what kind of friendship do you really actually have, right?

In any case, lies are so unfortunate because they strip away the foundation of any friendship, which is trust. A good friend of mine just ended a friendship with someone she has known for many years for that precise reason. It became impossible to know whether anything the friend said was truthful. No one is arguing for complete honesty in human relations, but she realized that the “benign untruths” her friend was telling her were not benign at all. The difference being that benign untruths are designed to spare your friend’s feelings. “A**-Saving Lies” are designed to spare YOURSELF some hassle, agro or natural consequences for your actions. It can become easy to convince yourself that your a**-saving lies are benign untruths in service of a friends’ feelings, simply because it is often easier to pretend that the absence of conflict with a friend is a favor to the friend rather than a favor to yourself.

Whenever I am tempted to tell an a**-saving lie, I remind myself that I will then have to come up with—and remember—ten more lies to cover this one lie, and if I’m discovered, I’ll never be able to convince my loved one that my intentions were good. After all, one lie can be forgiven on the basis of erring is human. Ten lies indicate a commitment to the lies, a need for the lies, and a shocking ability to tell a host of them without blinking…all of which will dismantle your relationship (and your friend’s trust) piece by piece. C.E Montague said it best:

A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie.

So where does this leave my friend? I had no real advice for her other than to know that she did the right thing for herself—and perhaps for her friend too. Because sometimes we can only learn the value of honesty by losing the very things that we thought our lies were preserving.