Is it possible to be in a relationship and not lie at all? Is it possible to be honest all the time, without hurting the love in your life? Does lying and loving coexist?

 

New findings suggest that people lie 2-3 times on an average in a ten-minute conversation. Yes you read that right, three times in a ten-minute conversation.

 

Professor Clancy Martin explores this topic in detail in his book Love and Lies. It is almost impossible to not lie and reasons for lying are almost always to do with love.

The prime reason for lying in a relationship is because you don’t want to hurt your partner. Professor Clancy concludes that learning how to love and loving well inevitably requires lying, but also argues that the best love relationships draw us slowly and with difficulty toward honesty and trust.

 

That brings us to another point –if even after many years in a relationship partners are still lying to each other-should it raise concerns? Not talking or omitting something is also lying –so just because you decided to not tell the partner about something does not mean you are being truthful.

 

As parents we lie all the time to our children. Almost every parent would remember telling a child that a particular game place was closed even though it wasn’t because it would have been impractical to take the child there. When we don’t want to have difficult conversations or want to avoid deadlock one-way demands we lie. Children lie too and all the time because they don’t want to hurt their parents. Just like a love relationship, parents can foray their relationship with children to honesty by putting in the right bricks. Right bricks could be made of patience, letting go when things go wrong and not going overboard with punishment and discipline if things have not occurred in the way they thought it would.

 

Some things are best omitted. For example there is no benefit in talking about past relationships. Firstly because the current love interest didn’t exist then and there is nothing positive for anybody in remembering about the past. Life should be led in a forward gear, almost always.

 

Lying cannot be eradicated totally but surely can be mitigated because ultimately it’s honesty and trust that make relationships thrive. But have a realistic dose of life and know that people lie. One should have realistic expectations about truthfulness and lies. The people who find themselves most betrayed by the lies of lovers are those who have the most unrealistic expectations about truthfulness. And the people who are most inclined to believe the lies they shouldn’t are the ones who tell themselves the biggest lie of them all: “I never tell lies.”

 Written by Suchitra Sharma