Withholding potentially hurtful truth is harmful for all parties. Someone may think they are preventing unnecessary conflict by selective omission, but they are really destroying trust. There is no safety without honesty and there is no intimacy without trust.
“When we went to those two work parties, you didn’t interact with any of the people you said you were friends with. Can you tell me who your friends are?” I asked Liam, the man I’d been dating.
We’d been casual friends for a couple years, but things were starting to move from friends into romance, and I wanted to make sure he was the kind of man who had a life of his own outside of me.
“People move in and out of the military so often, the people I used to be friends with aren’t here anymore,” he told me.
“So all the friends you told me you went to those gladiator competitions with and pub runs and such are now gone? So then who do you hang out with when you are not with me?”
“Well, I go out with work friends sometimes,” he said vaguely.
“Okay, like the ones we saw at the last farewell potluck?”
“Yeah,” he said, seemingly relieved for my offered suggestion.
“But you didn’t act like you knew them very well,” I said. “Those are acquaintances. Who are your actual friends?”
“I don’t know what you mean. Those are my friends,” he insisted.
“ Which one of them would you call up at 2am if you got a call that your sister died?” I asked.
He looked at me blankly.
“Who is your battle buddy? Who do you turn to when the going gets tough?”
“Oh, I would have to say it would be Samantha.”
“Samantha? Your best friend is the girl that seems to have ghosted you?”
“Yeah, I don’t really know why she hasn’t responded to me in months, but my closest friend would have to be her.”
“Maybe she is going through a hard time. I have friends who isolate themselves whenever stress or depression hits and they become impossible to reach. Is she the kind that hides when she gets down?”
“No, she’s not like that,” he said.
“She initiated facebook friends with me over a year ago when you introduced her to me,” I said. “But I noticed she is no longer my facebook friend. It looks like she’s not facebook friends with you anymore either. What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Liam said. “I think she deleted her account altogether.”
“It sounds like maybe something is really wrong. You told me other people you worked with in the military that committed suicide when they seemed to have it all together. Is there a way you can check on her and make sure she is actually ok?”
“I’ve tried her phone and her email, but she hasn’t responded,” he answered.
“Well, I want to meet more of your friends. Can we have a dinner party and invite some of each of our friends? Maybe she would come out and join us. If she is your best friend, I’d really like to get to know her too.”
“That’s a great idea.”
When Liam had introduced me to Samantha a long time ago, I instantly liked her. She was gorgeous with a killer smile. She had joyful, confident energy and I was excited for an opportunity to finally get to know her. At the same time, I was concerned that she was secretly suicidal. I’d been married to a man who was charismatic and playful in public but languid and hopeless at home and talked a lot about his fantasy to kill himself. I wasn’t sure if she would be a good friend or one that was emotionally draining.
When I asked Liam to tell me more about her, he continued to be vague. His history with her were limited to lists of events and facts, but the longer we were together, the more everything about himself tended to get more skeletal. The more interest I showed in his life, the more he appeared to have amnesia.
On the other hand, he voluntarily and prematurely gave me access to his location on his phone and read-receipts. I was unfamiliar with this feature on my phone and told him I didn’t need to know his whereabouts all the time, nor was I comfortable this early to have mine monitored in return. He assured me that he wasn’t giving me access to him to get me to do the same, but it still felt like forced intimacy when emotional transparency was lacking.
After two weeks and two attempts at sending Samantha an invitation to our dinner party, she finally replied to Liam with an odd text. Peppered with emojis, the message seemed overly excited about our relationship, saying she anticipated news of wedding bells, but she regretfully had other plans that night.
Like Liam being overly transparent about things that didn’t matter to me, Samantha was overly assumptive about our relationship. Something felt off.
When I asked how Liam felt receiving that, he didn’t answer, but I saw his body slump and his face fall. Wordlessly, he showed me other text replies he had received in the past when he had tried to touch base with her. They were equally as vague and pretentious. To me, it looked like she had been avoiding him for about a year, being polite and impersonal. It seemed cryptic.
When I asked if there was something more to their friendship he wasn’t telling me, he finally admitted they’d had sexual relations and he had been in love with her but she had not reciprocated. I took it in stride, grateful that the woman had not responded to him, but confused why Liam had hidden their history. This was a past relationship so there was no foul play, at least not that involved me. So I did not feel like I’d been wronged.
Until…the delayed reaction set in a few days later. I had lots of questions about their history and why she became unreachable. But the biggest red flag was that he hadn’t told me the truth about their relationship in the first place. Why had he just said they were friends from work? I had voluntarily offered up all of my skeletons, both my heartbreaks and my own misdeeds, so why had he kept this hidden from me? Moreover, why was he going along with me trying to become friends with an ex-situationship, allowing me to welcome her into my home?
The information he’d dribbled out had taken so much effort for me to draw out of him in the first place. Pieces of stories conflicted with each other, so when I would try to make connections in the story, he confirmed conclusions I came to that made him appear as a hero for the damsel in distress that he kept at arm’s length. It was difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that he had not been honest about his feelings for a girl who had rejected him, and it appeared by his half-truths and defensiveness that he must still be in love with her.
Over the next year, the lid to Pandora's Box kept puffing open, leaking more and more truths that discredited what I'd known about Liam. All his history continued to evolve into incongruences. I felt like I was playing detective, and every new puzzle piece made the other pieces stop fitting. While every aspect of him turned out to be a sham, the biggest mismatching pieces were around Samantha.
All of the incongruences he uttered made me feel crazy, and his passive aggressive behavior over trivial things destroyed every last ounce of trust I had. It wasn’t just the story about Samantha. It was like Liam didn’t want me to know who he was, and every fabrication he created to hide behind became more and more full of holes the closer I tried to get to him.
When my relationship with Liam finally ended, Liam flipped open the lid to Pandora's Box. He had lost me in his attempt to keep me, so there was nothing left to risk. He finally came clean...letting himself be the imperfect and sometimes terrible person that all humans are. There really was nothing sinister about his relationship with Samantha, other than being obsessed with a woman who gave him mixed signals until his unvoiced expectations turned sour and drove her away. But he was embarrassed and ashamed of himself, and he didn’t want to risk losing me if revealing his romantic failures made me think less of him.
It wasn’t the other woman that was the problem. It was the dishonesty and defensiveness over that as well as everything else that eroded my trust. We all have histories we aren’t proud of. If we reflect on those offenses and accept our dark sides rather than try to deny them, we can grow and improve. But if we bury them, they only fester in our own lack of self-forgiveness. When that self-denial becomes impossible to contain, it becomes poisonous.
Liam withheld information because he was afraid of the consequences of telling the truth. It is true that if he had been upfront with his misdeeds, he would still have risked my rejection. But that was my choice to have made, not his to manipulate. Instead of facing the possibility of my wrath or rejection, he lied. He thought avoiding angering me would avoid having to deal with my anger or breakup. But ultimately, he caused harm that was possibly irreparable. It takes a lot to rebuild trust after having decimated it over the course of a year.
Telling someone something about themselves may make someone decide not to choose them, but more often it’s simply that they are uncomfortable around other people’s emotions. They say that they don’t want to hurt another’s feelings or make them mad, but it really means they haven’t developed the capacity to handle the discomfort of someone else’s reaction.
While this story is an extreme, it starts out small. Little things snowball into bigger things. Another part in this story is that Liam kept trying to stop lying. He kept trying to come clean and create a new habit of honesty.
But that’s just it. Dishonesty becomes an adaptive habit to protect oneself. When you were little, what were the consequences for telling the truth? Did your mom/dad/teach/friend punish you if you revealed something? Did you get shamed, shunned, scolded, or scorned for taking responsibility for actions or for being the messenger for bad news?
If you learned that telling the truth came with negative consequences, then you also learned that lying could help keep you safe. You might have internalized messages of being a bad person because of things you did, so you kept them hidden from both other people but also from yourself. Self-deception is a very real thing that harms yourself and harms everyone around you. It takes a long time to unlearn, especially when you have hidden the truth even from yourself.
The only way to overcome the fear of telling the truth is facing it. Trust your partner they have the maturity to handle feedback. Give your partner a chance to show you they are safe to open up to.
“What someone doesn’t know won’t hurt them.” Yes it will.
While Liam's lies hurt me, the person it hurt most was himself. Self-deception is a cancer. But once Pandora's Box became empty of lies, do you know what was left? In Greek mythology, what remains is hope.
Tell the truth...all the hurtful truth...and keep telling the truth. And maybe, if you keep the box open, harm can heal and trust can return.
This story resonates with me as I have been there. Loosing trust of the person you love hurts yourself as well as your partner. Always be honest and open with your partner and let them choose if you are who they want to be with. Lying by omission or outright lying will destroy you and your partner as well as what you desire. When you are true and honest with yourself you become true and honest with your partner and others.