scheherazade through the looking glass: liar liar

by Parisa Aryán

I’ve been seeing a therapist who claims that honesty is most certainly not a virtue and that people should not abuse honesty in their relationships. He believes that, in order for a relationship to have the slightest chance of surviving the first few dates and progressing into something more long-term and serious, there are certain things that are better left unsaid, at least for a while. I really do see his point, but I’ve never really been able to put it into practice, which could explain why most of the men I go out with seem to fall off the face of the earth after the second date. There’s a term to describe this almost obscene sincerity from day one: it’s called being “emotionally slutty.” And something tells me that, nowadays, this is much worse than being just literally slutty.

When we are children, our parents do their best to try to teach us not to lie. We are told that if we lie we are “bad” and will be punished. If you belong to a religious family, you spend years being haunted by terrible nightmares about eternal flames and misery after death. If you don’t, you are just haunted by a very abstract guilt that you can’t really understand or get rid of. So it is safe to say that, either way, you are pretty screwed up with this whole lying issue for a good while.

Then, you grow up a little bit and realize that lying is actually a very big part of life. You see grown-ups lying and not worrying too much about going to Hell, and you learn the meaning of “white lies,” innocent little sentences that you throw in here and there to avoid someone getting hurt or to get out of a very difficult situation. You start hiding information from other people because “What they don’t know won’t hurt them” or because “It’s just better this way” and before you know it, you’re spending a scarily large proportion of your life lying.

So, is there anything really wrong with lying? If telling a lie is going to stop someone from suffering or is going to bring some other kind of advantage to you or to others, why is being honest generally considered better? Is my therapist right? Is dishonesty the real virtue?

There is an awful game-show on Spanish TV at the moment that is completely based on the fact that, most of the time, we are dishonest with the people we love. The contestants go through a lie detector test before the show and then are asked the same questions on the air in front of their husbands/mothers/friends (and half the country). If they are brave enough to tell the truth until the end, even if the truth is “Yes, honey, in the 20 years that we’ve been married I’ve had sexual fantasies about your mother every single night,” they win 100,000 euros — which, come to think of it, is really not that much money considering that you could easily be going through a divorce very soon.

I can’t really believe that someone thought this show up and I definitely can’t believe that millions of people watch it every week, but my point is that seeing a game-show that rewards you for being honest really makes you think about just how big a part of our lives lying is.

If you ask me, not the lies we tell one another, but rather, the lies we tell ourselves, are worrisome. Think about all the things that you tell yourself throughout your life in order to avoid suffering, all the “I’m fine”s and “I don’t care”s and “It’s OK”s that you have convinced yourself of when you really weren’t fine, you did care a lot and it was most certainly not OK. You see, this is one of the cool things that you get out of therapy. Alright, so it’s not that cool at the beginning and it does come as a pretty big shock when you realize that the feeling/thought that you were so sure about was merely a shell that you had constructed for yourself in order to keep going. You see, human beings don’t need to fight off other animals in the wilderness in order to stay alive — instead, this is the way in which we put our survival instinct into practice.

The thing is, after the initial shock of realizing that you’ve been deceiving yourself, you really have no choice but to start telling yourself the truth. And yes, you will most probably hate this truth at first, but this is really the only way to take that first step towards being a more complete person and living a happier life.

So I guess my therapist isn’t completely right after all — when it comes to the relationship between you and you, honesty absolutely is a virtue.

tagged under:advice, spain