Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

I am thinking a lot about lying today. Well, I am not actually thinking of telling a lie nor committing a particularly deceitful act myself today, but rather, am thinking today about why people lie and what trouble it causes.

The New York Times had an article about lying via modern technology, and how easy it is to lie via text. I was recently in a relationship where so much of the conversation was via text (perhaps a red flag in itself) and the texting included sweet nothings as well as lack of full disclosure, and/or avoidance ( "sorry, I have to go take a nap " rather than "sorry, I have other plans"). Needless to say, the article hit a nerve.

Why do we lie? I think it's pretty simple, because it is so much easier than dealing with the consequences of the truth. Early in my former marriage, I lied every day, saying that I was leaving work when I was really staying later, blaming my late arrival home on traffic rather than owning up to my lie, owning up to the fact that I wanted to stay at work, owning up to the fact that my husband's insistence on my coming home at a specific time felt suffocating. But really, did any of those lies do any good? I was still home later than he wanted, I was still frustrated with the dynamic, and a pattern that would ultimately strangle the marriage was forming through lies to myself and gentle lies to my husband.

But now, as I am dating and hoping that eventually I will form a new long term relationship, I am working hard on practicing truthfulness, both to me and to prospective partners, and I have no tolerance for these lies. Certainly, it seems that one should be able to hit midlife and be able to deal with the consequences of truth, albeit the sometimes messy, ugly truth.

Texting is convenient when a small amount of information needs to be conveyed and no conversation is necessary. But using texting to exclude the truth is cowardly at best, maddening and hurtful at worst. How can you know what to believe once you know someone has lied to you?

The Wake-up Call: Risk and Reality

If we are lucky in life, we get wake-up calls, experiences which indicate that we have been playing with fire or ignoring signs, experiences which force us to stop and notice some parts of our lives which we have been trying to stuff under a rug and pretend are not there. I am afraid that I have gotten a few over the past month, the most recent being Friday night.

As I was driving on the freeway on my way to an anticipated weekend with my son, I got stuck in stop and go traffic, a common situation and one which always begs me to entertain myself with anything - anything! - but driving. My radio, my phone, my email all called out to me like sirens, and I, a master multi-tasker, was sure that, as always, I could beat all the statistics about multi-tasking while driving. Not so this time; the photo of my beloved car depicts the results of my distraction when I became yet another statistic and slammed into the stopped car in front of me on the freeway.

While embarrassed, shaken up and annoyed by the situation, it made me look long and hard at how much I indulge in the behavior of assuming "it can't happen to me". And this is my wake-up call - that it can and it did, that as much as I thought that somehow I was superior in some way that should make me be able to get away with dangerous behavior, I am not. And I need to stop.

I once dated a man who could - and did - text and drive, googling and looking up directions while driving, sometimes on two devices, and it both terrified me and thrilled me, thrilled me to watch someone else defy the odds and terrified me knowing that he was putting us both at risk, to say nothing of the risk he posed to other drivers on the road. I didn't ask or demand that he stop his behavior nor did I absent myself from it, and I realize now that while partially I was afraid of being seen as a wimp, I was also motivated by the thrill of the bravado of the risk and beating the odds. Macho behavior can be attractive and seductive; if it wasn't, we all would have stopped engaging in it or responding to it long ago.

My injured little car is proof that I am not somehow magically exempt from the risk. My bruised ego is proof that I was just fooling myself. I am grateful that this was only a wake-up call, and feel fortunate that I caused no greater harm. As I drove on the freeway today, I could feel those impulses calling out to me to glance off to my phone, to see if something important was happening outside my car. It was then I realized that learning to wait was something I badly needed a crash course in.