dishonesty

Why do people lie? How can you tell when they are? Have you ever thought someone was lying but then it turned out they were telling the truth? Or maybe they’re really lying but they’ve convinced everyone around them with their utter sincerity?

I feel so gullible. I want to believe the best from people. I want to think if they’re not telling the truth, they didn’t mean it; they misunderstood the question or the situation, they don’t know their own innermost motivations. Something to justify the fact that they’re standing there in front of me or speaking into the phone and telling me things I know can’t be true. With a voice that sounds so incredibly sincere, with nary a bobble or stumble, smooth and firm. A voice that makes me wonder: Is it me? Did I misunderstand? Did I misread, overreact, do I want to actually ascribe worse motivations and actions and really they’re innocent of all wrongdoing and it’s a colossal foul up? And maybe that voice sounds so rational, so reasonable, so honest because it is. Or maybe they’re just damned good liars.

I caught someone in a lie a few months ago. He was supposed to attend a wedding in another city and cancelled at the last possible moment. The story he told was one for the record books, full of sturm and drang involving the intense security and long lines for said security gates at Penn Station. But New York doesn’t have security at train stations. It was a beauty of a whopper, designed to make you feel sorry for him. In that case, I knew it was a lie before he opened his mouth because I knew he needed to find an excuse to get out of coming and also that he’s not someone who can do anything the simple way. Truth is usually far simpler than a lie, but it’s also often not easy, it means saying something that can be painful either for your audience to hear or for you to admit. And so people twist their stories into something more palatable. I’m not immune, I’ve been known to tell a little white lie now and then. Seldom, though. And it always feels strange as hell. I don’t lie well. It doesn’t sit right. And so I can’t figure out how other people do and do it so well.

I think to lie well you do have to believe at least a little in what you’re saying. Or at least you have to believe that you’re right to say it because the truth is more complicated but also would exonerate you, if they only understood the whole situation. To lie effectively you have to feel like you’re in the right overall only people wouldn’t understand so you give them this predigested pap instead so they don’t have to think.

It makes me feel so helpless, that’s part of it. Because if someone’s distorting the facts, you can’t have a real conversation. You can’t get to the bottom of anything with them. You can try, and they can pretend to, but they don’t have to change anything, they can just lie again and make it okay.

Someone who works with Damian lied to me this week. Or at least I think she did. Someone else, someone I consider intelligent and thoughtful, thinks this person didn’t lie. So maybe she didn’t. But when I told her what Damian said (my concern for this situation stemmed in part from his comments, including that she doesn’t want to play with him), she said “I don’t want to say he’s lying, but…” and let her voice trail off. When a grown woman starts to accuse a five year old of lying? Something’s wrong there.

I don’t know. He is a five year old, this makes him less than ideal as a witness. There may be more truth there than I can unearth. But there’s enough history in this particular relationship, not all of it good, that Dan and I think it’s time to pull the plug whether or not lies are involved. And Damian, unlike her, has no motivation to lie. He's not covering his ass, he's not setting her up. He's a young kid with no agenda here.

But it leaves me feeling horrible. What if I’m wrong about her? This isn’t a court of law, though even in the courts, judges and juries can’t always get to the essential truth. People lie to cover their asses, they lie all the time. Some people lie like they breathe. Some people lie to themselves and so the lies become their version of the truth of their world. And who’s to say I never lie to myself? How can I know? They say the story of a war is told through the eyes of the victor, the other side doesn’t get a voice and their tale might be very different. There’s no such thing as an objective witness, is there? Maybe there’s no such thing as objective truth, nothing rock solid and tangible, nothing you can grab onto and feel the weight of it in the palm of your hand. Which leaves me feeling lost today. Did I make the right decision?

In a way, it doesn’t matter if she lied. The fact that we think she may have, the fact that she did do some things (Dan and I witnessed them ourselves) that we find questionable, even the fact that we feel we can’t talk to her about this, not in any real way – it all means I did do the right thing when I said “We have to move on from this. Now.” But I wish it felt better. I hate not trusting. I hate assuming the worst. I hate being the one to break off a two year relationship with someone who seems to mean well. But maybe she never did, maybe she lied about that too.

Posted by Tamar at December 10, 2003 02:11 PM