How many times have you lied to people you genuinely love and respect in the past few days?
If someone asked me that, I’m pretty sure I’d say “Zero! I don’t lie to people, but especially not to those I care about most!”
And by doing so, I’d be telling another lie.
I don’t think of myself as a liar. I don’t think of myself as dishonest.
But maybe I am.
I used to think I was this really good and nice person just because I got along with people so well and had a bunch of friends. And you know what I found out later? That my behavior sometimes hurt people—friends and family. And you know what else I found out later? That my behavior often hurt my wife, and even though I thought of myself as a good husband, she thought and felt differently, and left anyway.
I’m pretty sure the fact that I was hurting my wife rules out the possibility that I was one.
So let’s get honest for a minute.
The uncomfortable kind.
The truth is that I probably lie all of the time and because I label it something else, I don’t feel like a liar.
I want to talk about why, because I think it’s probably significant as to how marriages, or relationships in general, deteriorate slowly through these tiny little breaches of trust that I think work a bit like a tree being chopped down.
Each swing of the axe affects the tree’s structural integrity just a little bit. If the trunk’s large enough, you can keep chopping away for the longest time, and everything seems fine. The tree remains standing.
And then, maybe on the fiftieth, or hundredth, or thousandth swing, it comes crashing down.
It wasn’t the last blow that caused the tree to fall. It was all of them before it. The cumulative effect.
The final blow wasn’t more damaging than the first or tenth. It was just the last one the tree could handle before giving way.
We talk a lot about these little moments that add up in relationships. These seemingly inconsequential little conversations or arguments where one person hurts the other, and some kind of fight ensues, before an eventual apology or mutual calm takes over and things seem to return to normal.
These are the tree-chopping moments. A little bit more damage was caused, but by all appearances, that tree stands tall and looks like it will remain so.
I think the person who felt pain (which is sometimes both of them) noticed the extra swing of the axe, and maybe the person who didn’t feel pain, and spent the fight defending their behavior and spinning the moment to accuse her or him of overreacting and misinterpreting the situation, forgets all about it.
So, what is a lie?
The 3 Tiers of Lying
I like to rank things. Sorry.
I think there are three tiers—three categories—of lies.
And in my opinion, one is very bad, the second can range from very bad to just kind-of bad, and the third doesn’t feel bad at all.
I think a lot of people categorize mistruths in their own minds, just like I do, and they can morally justify some of them because they don’t really feel like lies.
Tier 1 – Lying Evil Piece of Shit Lies
They’re the worst and most indefensible kind of falsehood. Lying Evil Piece of Shit Lies involve a person being intentionally deceptive for some nefarious purpose. To steal. To con someone into sleeping with them. Whatever.
Example:
Man meets Woman at business event. She’s single. He’s not wearing a wedding ring. He invites her to dinner. She likes him. They start seeing each other. Sleeping together.
And then one day, she’s out with friends at a random restaurant, and in walks the guy she’s seeing with another woman and three children.
All along, he’s been misrepresenting himself to both her and, presumably, his wife and family.
Fuck that guy.
Tier 2 – Cover Your Ass or Look More Awesome Lies
These are STILL indefensible in my estimation, but at least I GET why someone would do it.
Circumstances matter. Because a Cover Your Ass lie could certainly look and feel an awful lot like a Lying Evil Piece of Shit lie under the right circumstances, such as:
“Where were you last night?”
“I was playing cards with the guys. Just like I said.”
But she knows he wasn’t there because the actual person hosting the poker game texted her to ask where her husband was.
And the truth is, he was with a woman he’s having an affair with.
BUT.
That identical scenario can happen, and it wouldn’t seem like an Evil Piece of Shit lie at all.
For example:
“Where were you last night?”
“I was playing cards with the guys. Just like I said.”
But she knows he wasn’t there because the actual person hosting the poker game texted her to ask where her husband was.
And the truth is, he was meeting their travel agent because he’s going to surprise his wife with an elaborate trip overseas to celebrate their upcoming wedding anniversary.
…
Our self-preservation instincts are strong. It’s how our ancestors survived lions and bears trying to eat them all the time. So when we’re afraid that telling the whole truth will HURT us, it’s not hard to resort to a lie that doesn’t feel ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ in order to avoid experiencing that hurt, or feeling what would seem to be unnecessary discomfort.
I tell self-preservation lies sometimes. I do.
I don’t think I tell them in my close personal relationships in a way that I perceive to be a breach of trust, but I also know better than to trust my own judgment anymore.
Maybe I’m just embarrassed about something that someone else doesn’t really need to know, so I find some other way to say it that isn’t the most truth I could tell.
I don’t think it’s good.
I think it’s lying, and I think lying is almost universally frowned upon as a bad thing for good reason.
I understand why someone might make something sound cooler than it actually was to try to impress a date, or professional colleagues, or friends.
I understand why someone might omit a detail, or talk around some embarrassing thing when explaining a situation because they’re afraid of that person they’re crushing on, or their friend, or their co-worker thinking they’re a douchebag and not wanting to hang out with them anymore.
We are irrational creatures, us humans.
Tier 3 – Little White Lies
You already know about these. You probably tell one every day, and don’t think twice about the moral implications of doing so because they don’t FEEL wrong or bad. They just don’t.
If I think a meal tasted kind of shitty, and I say “Thank you so much for dinner. It was wonderful,” I’m not going to beat myself up about it.
I played along with stories about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy that today I actually have mixed emotions about, because I have legitimate concerns about the psychological effect it has on kids when they grow up and realize the ENTIRE WORLD, including the people they love the most had orchestrated a scheme to make them believe that something was real that actually wasn’t.
No one was trying to hurt anyone, and it’s all done in the spirit of childhood innocence and helping kids have a good time, so we all convince ourselves it’s fine. That it’s a good thing, even.
But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve begun to question how true that is.
If I don’t like someone’s shirt, or haircut, or new car, or whatever, and they ask me about it, I’m not going to tell them the whole truth if I believe doing so will offend them or hurt their feelings.
Maybe that makes me some kind of coward or weakling. I don’t know.
I just know I don’t like how it feels to say or do things that make people feel bad, and not ONCE in my life have I ever intentionally tried to do that.
So, sometimes, I won’t tell the whole truth because I perceive it to be the ‘right’ thing to do.
NOT hurting someone I care about > Being the most honest I can possibly be.
I think there’s a reasonable debate to be had about that little math equation, and I think how everyone feels about it will depend on a thousand unknown variables.
How Lies Destroy Marriages and Compromise Relationships
Here’s the part I didn’t get when I was married and was justifying the Little White Lies or Cover Your Ass lies I told.
Human beings have NEEDS. Not wants. Not nice-to-haves. NEEDS.
And the needs people have come with varying degrees of importance.
For example, we NEED a phone, right? And it’s a life emergency that yours just went over the side of the boat and sunk to the bottom of the lake or ocean.
But now, you get word that a tornado swept through your neighborhood, and your house is gone. You don’t have anywhere to live. How big of a deal is that lost phone feeling now?
You’re homeless, and you can’t even text your friends or put up a sad Instagram post about it. It feels like the sky’s falling at this point.
But suddenly, the sky IS falling. An asteroid falls down to Earth out of nowhere and it’s dark and scary, and it doesn’t take everyone long to figure out that the ash cloud from the asteroid impact is going to block out the sun for the next two years, and all plant and animal life on earth is going to die. How big of a deal is the tornado-hit home situation now?
It’s chaos. Scary. People are looting big-screen TVs they can’t watch because there’s no power or internet right now. Everything looks post-apocalyptic, like you’ve seen in the movies.
But suddenly you hear a gunshot, and the Jolly Rancher piece of candy in your mouth goes down the wrong pipe, and you can’t breathe. You’re choking. No matter what you do. Your body can’t get air. If you can’t unblock your air passage, you’re dead in 30 seconds…
How scary does that gunshot you heard feel now?
…
That’s probably excessively dark, and I’m sorry, but it amateurishly illustrates something in psychology called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs, and it’s usually presented in pyramid form like this:
There are these things in life we all want and need. BUT, if you take away one of the foundational needs holding it up? None of that other shit matters. We’re stuck trying to regain that foundational need, and things can’t improve until we do.
If you look at Maslow’s pyramid, you’ll notice that after the most basic human needs like air, water and food, the next thing people need is Safety.
Some people only think of ‘safety’ in the context of physical safety. Like NOT getting murdered or kidnapped or burnt by fire or hit by a moving vehicle.
But there are other elements to safety, and I think it’s common for men—young and old—to have the wrong idea about safety and trust in their relationships that will inevitably lead to divorces that neither they nor their wives actually want.
People ALSO need to feel ‘safe’ financially. People need to feel ‘safe’ with good health. People need to feel ‘safe’ emotionally.
People need to be able to trust their romantic partners to not hurt them.
Sometimes a husband leaving a pair of dirty socks on the bedroom floor HURTS his wife.
Sometimes a wife not demonstrating faith in her husband’s ability to succeed at something HURTS her husband.
And sometimes, being lied to hurts.
Sometimes—even if the lies told were designed to preserve someone’s feelings or simply cover your ass—the experience of being lied to by the person you love and trust the most HURTS.
…
So maybe several years ago, your girlfriend found out you were going to strip clubs all the time and getting lap dances, and maybe that really hurt her feelings.
And maybe you promised to never do that again.
Then, maybe a couple of years after that, during your engagement, your fiancée figured out that you were looking at porn, and it made her feel bad in the same way you going to those strip clubs made her feel bad.
Maybe when she asked you about it, you lied. And she knew you lied. And maybe because you don’t think looking at pornography is a big deal, you don’t think she should make a big deal out of it.
It’s not like I’m cheating, or even looking at a real-live person!
You just want to protect her feelings.
So you don’t tell the truth. For HER, you tell yourself. But really you just don’t want to feel uncomfortable, but it’s easy enough to justify.
And maybe this keeps happening off and on through the months and years.
And then maybe one day you’re married and on a bachelor party golfing trip with your buddies out of town, and one of the guys hires a stripper to the vacation house you guys are staying in. You’re all drinking and having a good time, but everything’s on the up and up, behaviorally.
Then maybe your wife asks you on the phone what you guys are doing, and you say you’re playing cards and having drinks, and it’s actually true.
But she also knows that your buddy hired a stripper because she’s friends with one of the other wives, who casually mentioned it with an eye roll: Our big, silly, idiot husbands, amirite?
Strippers and pornography were never a marriage problem or breach of trust in her house, so she didn’t realize the trigger she just caused your wife.
Suddenly, she’s the young woman crying about your strip club appetites back when you were in your early twenties again.
Suddenly, she wonders: Why would he lie to me about that? What ELSE does he lie to me about?
There’s no answer he could ever give to convince her that he actually respects his wife.
There’s no answer he could ever give that would make that feeling go away. Those nagging questions: Who is this guy? Do I really KNOW my husband? If I don’t even know who this guy is, how can I trust myself to know who I can feel safe with, and who I can’t? If I can’t trust my husband anymore, maybe we shouldn’t be married. Oh my God. I’m so afraid of what might happen to us and our kids.
I don’t trust my husband.
I don’t trust myself.
I don’t feel safe in my life.
…
And maybe that’s the end. Maybe that’s the moment the marriage ended and a family broke apart, whether anyone realized it as it was happening.
We All Wear Masks But Must Take Them Off With Our Forever Person
We all do in some form or fashion.
But the people who MUST always have behind-the-mask access is our spouses or long-term committed romantic partners.
That’s the only way it works.
We hide parts of ourselves because we fear rejection.
It’s difficult and scary to take off the armor for someone not knowing whether they’ll choose to stab us in the heart.
But the couples that make it to forever?
They’re the ones who were brave enough to.
…
We tell lies sometimes and they don’t even feel bad or wrong.
But, just maybe, even when we’re not telling Evil Piece of Shit Lies, and the people who love and trust us most find out that we were dishonest with them, maybe the PAIN is the same as an Evil Piece of Shit Lie.
And then.
Maybe even less-severe Cover Your Ass Lies and totally innocent Little White Lies begin to cause that SAME amount of pain.
That same feeling of betrayal and mistrust.
That loss of safety.
I can’t even breathe.
And then it’s over.
…
But with the slightest adjustment; just a little bit more courageous honesty and trust-building, maybe that tree remains.
In the most tumultuous and violent storms.
Steady.
Tall.
Rooted.
Strong.
Always.
—
This post was previously published on Must Be This Tall To Ride and is republished on Medium.
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