The truth can set you free
If I can co-opt the words of the inimitable Carly Simon, and I think I can, ‘you’re so vain, you probably think this blog is about you’. It should go without saying that the examples presented below are based on my own experience but, if you’re a friend of mine, they aren’t necessarily about you. It should also go without saying that if the cap fits you should wear it so…if you examine yourself and find yourself frequently guilty of any of the behaviours upon which I am frowning - and I will readily admit that I’ve been guilty of most of them at some point or another, although infrequently - then you might want to think about how you can deal with that. So…on with the show.
Everybody lies. It’s an unavoidable human truth. The fact that everybody lies isn’t, in and of itself, a major problem. The problem comes in the obvious corollary - not everybody lies to the same extent.
At one end of the spectrum you have people who lie so freely that it becomes almost impossible to separate truth from fiction in the outpourings from their brain. At the other, you have people who are so scrupulous they’d rather hack off their own limbs than allow an untruth to spill from their lips. Neither extreme is particularly common and neither is without its problems; most people fall somewhere in between the two. There are some particularly odd people who feel it their duty to tell ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ in every situation such that every thought, mostly negative, that comes into their heads is voiced. They abuse the term ‘honesty’ to cover up the fact that they just want to be rude. These people are best avoided.
The biggest problem of all, however, is that we have invented a ‘scale of lies’ such that ‘little white lies’ are the norm and we reserve our ire for the BIG lies. I’m sure most people would agree that, for example, saying you didn’t kill someone when you did is a lie of epic proportions. It’s a self-serving lie which actually hurts other people more than the truth. Most people, in the case of police scrutiny and in the face of evidence to the contrary, would find it almost impossible to hold up a lie of this magnitude. On the other hand, saying ‘you look great’ when, in all honesty, they could look a lot better, is something people do frequently. In this case, the honesty will almost certainly hurt more than the lie and it requires considerable diplomatic skill to work your way around the minefield of people’s personal insecurity without either lying or causing offence.
When someone lies they are generally making a decision in their head that the consequences of the lie being discovered are slight compared to the consequence of the lie holding. Context is also key. Telling someone they look great when that person is your partner, and you’re off our for drinks with friends, will validate them in their own mind and give them the confidence to enjoy the evening knowing that they don’t have to worry about their appearance (to an extent anyway…we all know some people worry about their appearance whether they have cause to or not and no amount of words will placate them).
A lot of the lying we do is around friendship and social situations. This is the stuff that can really hurt and annoy the most because it’s usually unnecessary. Consider the case of a young man whose friends text him asking if he fancies going for a drink. He weighs up the pros and cons, decides how he feels and whether an evening with friends would, on the whole, be a good thing or a bad thing at that moment in time. He decides that after a stressful day he really would rather stay at home and curl up in front of the fire with a mug of cocoa and the latest Terry Pratchett. Fair enough. He now faces a choice in how he handles letting his friends down. The logical person, we’ll call them Nick, would say ‘Don’t really feel like it to be honest. Bad day at work so would rather stay in’ and I think, in most cases, that is what people would do. But the illogical person, we’ll call them Tony, will do the exact opposite. He’ll say ‘yeah, sounds good, let me know what your plans are and I’ll meet you later’ knowing full well he has no intention of going out. What, I would imagine, he’s thinking is ‘well I don’t want to let them down so I’ll say I’m coming and then later I’ll let them know I’m not coming by which time they’ll be pretty merry and they won’t care’. The problem is, they do care. The human brain constantly makes assumptions and plays out scenarios based on the information it has to hand. A night out with Tony will be inherently different from a night out without them. Expectations will form in the brain of how the night might proceed - whether Tony’s friends have any Tony-specific news or conversation topics - not knowing that in actual fact Tony will never be present. Nick’s friends know where they stand and their brain will never have to waste time factoring them into an evening in which they will play no part because they already know that that’s the case. That one ‘meaningless’ lie can actually ruin, or certainly transform, a night out.
There are two more people to meet and as I’m running out of ‘names of people that I don’t know’ we’ll call them Dick and Dom. Dick will invent some kind of major reason why they can’t come out to avoid admitting they just want to stay at home. Dom will come out anyway, even though they don’t want to, and hence put a downer on the whole evening.
Imagine you’re using the internet to ‘find someone’. You know…’FIND someone’. Like…for coffee and ‘stuff’. You have Nicks and Tonys of your own to deal with. You meet someone via some means, you get chatting, you have a lot in common and you think ‘ooh, this person could be an interesting person to know more…intimately’. So you steer the conversation towards such matters with the deft skill of a starling in flight and, again, things seem to be going well. There’s flirting, there’s chemistry…all wonderful. What you don’t know is that Nick and Tony are shameless flirts who enjoy a bit of banter but, for reasons entirely unrelated to you or your personality, want nothing more from such an encounter. You find this out quite quickly from Nick. When you ask if they’d like to meet for coffee they reply ‘I enjoy chatting to you online but that’s all it will ever be for me’. Tony, on the other hand, agrees immediately. Then they have to go and do some errand and say they’ll talk later. Then the next time you message them they ignore you and then, once you go offline, they send you a message saying ‘sorry, didn’t get your message…left it logged in lol’. And this goes on a while until you finally realise that they don’t want coffee but neither do they want to be honest about it. Presumably in Tony’s brain it’s better not to let you down. Dick will, of course, keep arranging to meet but then have last minute meetings, lose their phone, get kidnapped by aliens and, in fact, lead a far more interesting life than most fictional characters. They will literally say anything to get out of meeting…apart from the truth. Dom will marry you.
These are the lies we all tell far too often. For selfish reasons we tell ourselves that it’s better for all concerned if we ‘massage the truth’ and deploy ‘little white lies’, but really it’s not. I’m not talking about diplomacy - choosing the right way of phrasing the truth to make it the least hurtful possible - because that’s natural. I’m talking about flat-out dishonesty. I try very hard to stay on the side of Nick and very rarely stray into Tony’s area - or Dick and Dom’s for that matter. I value honesty above all other human traits and I make a conscious decision to apply it, as far as possible, in my life.
So if someone doesn’t fancy a night out, I want to know when I ask, not six hours down the line. If someone doesn’t want to chat to me, whether it’s because they think I’m an idiot or because they just don’t want to, then I’d like to know that too. But if you’re one of the ‘whole truth’ people from the third paragraph who simply can’t help being honest, solicited or not, then yes, I know my arse looks fat - in or out of these jeans - which is why I didn’t ask in the first place.
