I love words. They are so cool.
Why People Lie
Before you figure out how to tell if a person is lying or if it’s even worth looking into, it’s important to understand what motivates people to lie. Everyone lies - everyone, and sometimes it’s ok. Often, telling a little white lie can be harmless, especially if it is done in order to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. For example, telling a person they look thin in a particular outfit or telling him or her you can’t go out because you will be working, when in actuality you just don’t want to go out with that particular person, are examples of acceptable lies. It has been said that when women lie it is usually to make other people feel good and when men lie, it’s more self serving and is usually done to make themselves feel good.
In my experience, that is absolutely the truth. Himself lies when he knows I will get mad if he tells the truth. The Herd will lie to protect themselves from getting in trouble and all of them, young and old, will lie to get their way.
Deciding whether a male is lying is not an easy task. In Himself's case I think he really intends to be "right home," but, as he is a male and his distractability index is about -5, he gets involved socializing and doesn't think about what time it is. For me telling someone I will be right home and then getting distracted like that would mean that I had told a lie because my original purpose was to go home. Allowing myself to be diverted from that purpose, implicit in my statement of intent, would be making my stated intent a lie. Males don't seem to think like that though. Discerning between a lie of omission and a lie of commission seems to be beyond their capacity.
A lie of omission is leaving out a pertinent fact, something pivotal. There wouldn't be a reason to leave that point out if it weren't something that was a problem of some sort. Why bother, in that case.
A lie of commission is quite a different subject. That's that outright whopper the kid tells you when you know for a fact that he wasn't where he stated he had been. This comics illustrates a lie of commission:*
That kind of thing happens very rarely with Himself but the kids? *sigh* I usually know when they are telling whoppers but, in some cases, calling them on it wouldn't be helpful. DS3 doesn't tell lies much. Neither does DS2. SS has a tendency to "color" the truth or leave out important information that would change circumstances.
Himself, Rod and I were talking about this one day. They figured that the average male in a relationship lies, for one reason or another, about 5% of the time. That's the outright, baldface whopper category. It seemed to me that neither of them understood my view on the subject. They didn't think that forgetting the time constituted a lie. This seems to be more because of the way males are about stuff, ie they tend to be relatively shallow. The finer nuances of ephemerals like mendacity simply escape them. The difference is so fine that they just don't, and never will, get it. Expecting them to is a good way to become upset, feel betrayed and truly mak a mess of a relationship. That's too bad, really, but it's just the way things are.
People are interesting but not as much fun as words.
* I apologize for the poor quality of the scan. I don't have a screen to use when duplicating these anymore and it won't allow me to switch it to a decent grayscale or b&w. Darn it. Will keep trying...
2 comments:
AW used to lie to me all the time - bat his pretty eyelashes at me and just drop these lies he assumed I was too stupid enough to get. (Yeah, I'm stupid.) And when I would call him on his lies he would turn around and try to justify himself and his "need to tell lies", thinking that his pretty eyelashes would make things all better. But there really are guys out there that aren't pathological liars. I've met a few. Honest. They do exist. They're just more rare than naturally made 10+ carat diamonds. I had a coworker once that I used to talk "guy talk" with. And every time we brought up something honest but negative about the male of the species she would say "well bless their hearts, we have to feel sorry for them, they do have that extra chromosome after all". It should now be noted that former coworker was built like an exotic dancer - only prettier and a better shot at the target range.
Bless theirs hearts, indeed!
"need to tell lies." hmmmmm, is that on Maslow's heirarchy someplace. I don't seem to recall it. ;-)
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