The “I’m not proud of what I did” Lie

Perhaps the most classic lie is the “I’m not proud of what I did” lie.

In the first few weeks after moving to Maryland to start my PhD, the WiFi went down in my house. The router happened to be in my room. I noticed the WiFi was down but didn’t feel like dealing with it, so I did little to troubleshoot the problem. This was inconsiderate because a few of my roommates were new to the US and didn’t yet have cellular data, so they relied heavily on the WiFi. Some time after the WiFi went down, one of my roommates approached me to ask about it, and I wanted to pretend I hadn’t noticed it was down to hide the fact that I knew but hadn’t tried to fix it.

This illustrates an interesting feature of the “I’m not proud of what I did” lie: often, the things I wasn’t proud of were smaller than I might have guessed. I wouldn’t have predicted I’d want to lie about my actions until the moment it was time to own up to them.

The “I don’t want to hurt you” Lie

Getting ready to move to Maryland, I found a house I wanted to live in and then talked with other people looking for housing to decide who to invite to be roommates. When I spoke with someone interested in joining the house but I didn’t want to live with them, I always hesitated to tell them the truth.

I really dislike potentially hurting people. Not avoiding these conversations is something I’m working on. For me, lies in this category vary in how much wanting to lie is really about not wanting to hurt someone else versus not wanting to personally experience the discomfort of rejecting someone. Lies to avoid hard conversations, broadly speaking, form a very large category of potential lies for me and, I suspect, other people.

Variations of the “I don’t want to hurt you” lie include the “I don’t want to make you feel some other vaguely negative emotion” lie, like the time I went out to dinner with a group of people I didn’t know very well and ordered a meal it turned out I didn’t like. I wanted to lie about it, I think because I didn’t want to dampen everyone else’s evening by letting them know I didn’t like my food.

The Smile and Nod Lie

Adjacent to the “I’ll lie to make you feel good instead of bad” category is the smile and nod lie. The smile and nod lie is specific to microaggressions and other insults disguised as compliments.

Many months ago, one of the other presenters came up to me after I’d given a presentation in an informal setting. I had never spoken to him before. He opened the conversation with something like, “I’m so glad you presented.” Then he said, “you’re really into it!” It struck me as backhanded and immensely condescending. I said, “thank you” and smiled like he’d given me an excellent compliment, then walked away rolling my eyes.

Part of me wishes I’d said something to him, like, “that feels really condescending,” instead of faking it. Whether or not I’d do things differently if I could relive it, one thing I feel strongly about is the fact that I didn’t owe him anything. Not my smile, not my thank you, not my composed education about the impact of his words.

The “I’m Afraid of this Conversation” Lie

One of my roommates wasn’t home in time for the house meeting we’d scheduled. When she arrived very late, I was frustrated with her but wanted to pretend I wasn’t frustrated.

This is different from the “I don’t want to hurt you” lie because I wasn’t worried about my roommate’s feelings, I was worried about our relationship and whether acknowledging a rupture, however small, would derail our fledgling friendship. I was afraid of the conversation the truth would necessitate.

The Feared All-or-Nothing Conclusion Lie

Often, the specific truth wasn’t so scary, but it was accompanied by the fear that the audience might conclude something broader based on this truth. Let’s return to the example of me wanting to get another slice of pizza at a work pizza party. There was plenty of pizza left, but so far no one had gotten more than one slice. It wasn’t that I didn’t want my coworkers to know I’d eat two slices of pizza, I was afraid they would extrapolate based on that instance to conclude that I was gluttonous. (I know I said I wouldn’t tell you whether I actually lied or not, but I can’t pass up this opportunity to brag. I did get a second slice of pizza, and many others followed suit. Please, hold your applause.)

In most instances when I wanted to lie, I was partially avoiding some possible global conclusion about me or the other person that might be made based on the interaction. I coded these feared all-or-nothing conclusions. In 56 of the 72 potential lies, there was a relevant all-or-nothing conclusion. Although, the feared all-or-nothing conclusion wasn’t necessarily the primary motivation behind wanting to lie.

Here are the all-or-nothing conclusions about the other person and the number of times they came up:

And here are the all-or-nothing conclusions about me:

The all-or-nothing conclusions about other people were much less varied than the conclusions about me. I was most frequently afraid to make other people feel not liked/likable or not interesting. Being liked and being interesting strike me as pretty basic and broadly applicable human motivations, so it makes sense that I was hesitant to say anything that might call into question these characteristics.

Compared to the 4 all-or-nothing conclusions about other people, 18 unique all-or-nothing conclusions about me came up.

I was most frequently afraid to be perceived as gluttonous. I could write a whole post about women and eating. Here, I’ll just say that, for women, I can think of few labels more stigmatizing than “gluttonous.” I don’t think it’s the thing I’m most afraid of so much as the thing I most frequently feel pressured to perform maintenance in avoidance of. When being perceived as gluttonous was on the line, I hesitated before doing what I wanted to do. And being perceived as gluttonous often felt like it was on the line.

I look at this list of 18 all-or-nothing conclusions about me and it strikes me how much there is to be afraid of. I think there are certain socially unacceptable traits that we’re trained to be in constant maintenance against, and this list enumerates some of them. It’s also striking how much the 7 deadly sins make appearances.

I think the list of different conclusions about me is so much longer than the list of different conclusions about other people because there are only so many attributes that are essentially based on someone else’s perceptions of you. The four conclusions about other people, “you’re not likeable,” “you’re not interesting,” “you’re socially incompetent,” and “your English is hard to understand,” are about traits that are inherently relational. My impression holds much more weight about whether someone else’s English is hard to understand than it is about whether they’re, say, athletic. There’s nothing I could confess to someone that would make them conclude that they’re not athletic in the way that admitting to not understanding what someone is saying to me could impact their impression of their English.

Meanwhile, there’s no limitation on things I could admit to having said or done or thought that would make people conclude a variety of negative things about me.

In moments when there was an all-or-nothing conclusion at stake, whether I decided to tell the truth depended largely on my relationship to that particular conclusion. There were some conclusions I could confidently reject, and thus could embrace the related truths. Being unintelligent is a good example of that. I love the way I think and it’s enough for me, so I’m generally not afraid of other people concluding that I’m unintelligent. Once I realized this, I started openly expressing moments of bewilderment or confusion.

A few months ago I was on a first date and I mentioned that my friend recently moved to Switzerland, to Zurich specifically. Then I suddenly had a terrified moment in which I thought, “wait, Zurich is in Switzerland, right?” Since I no longer believe in faking it so other people don’t think I’m stupid, I had this thought out loud. My date was also not entirely sure if Zurich is in Switzerland. It is, by the way, but I wouldn’t blame you if you momentarily confuse Zurich with Munich. It’s a very understandable mistake.

There were other conclusions I could see some truth in. “I’m not a good listener” is one. The all-or-nothing conclusion is still a distortion, but it’s also true that I could be a better listener. Finding myself wanting to lie about having not really listened to someone, I realized I also wanted to start listening better. My parents were usually the audience I was faking it about listening to, and they deserve better.

The “I don’t want to look at it” lie

I think often we lie to maintain distance from things we don’t want to look at directly.

Last year, a friend invited me to a gathering she was hosting for Purim and I didn’t want to go. I wanted to lie and tell her I already had plans so I wouldn’t have to admit I just didn’t want to attend her gathering. I couldn’t acknowledge that I didn’t want to go to her gathering without also acknowledging that we hadn’t really been friends for a while, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue trying to revive the relationship. I wasn’t ready to face all that, so I wanted to pretend we existed in an alternate reality where I simply had other plans.

I lied about breaking the drinking glass for similar reasons. I had once been very close with those roommates, but things had gotten more and more complicated and difficult. I couldn’t text my roommates admitting to breaking a glass without acknowledging how little grace it felt there remained between us, so I didn’t tell them. Then, it was a slippery slope to lying when my roommate asked me about it directly.

I’m sure it won’t come as a surprise to you that lying isn’t something we reserve for other people. We lie to ourselves, too. I couldn’t measure it the way I could measure wanting to lie to other people, but looking back on the lies I wanted to tell, it’s clear that sometimes I was the person I most wanted to hide things from. When we don’t want to face the truth about something, we lie to other people, too.

The truth is not so bad.

In many cases, it was obvious as soon as I identified the truth I was hesitating to share that the truth was just not so bad.

Here’s an example: I was out at a ramen restaurant with a new friend. When the server brought our ramen, he asked if either of us wanted a fork to use (we already had chopsticks). I wanted a fork, but didn’t want to admit to wanting a fork. It became a little joke in my head, imagining myself dramatically confessing. “I know we don’t know each other very well, but there’s something I need to admit. I’m not great with chopsticks.” It’s just ridiculous.

There were so many moments like that. Things that I felt initially hesitant to reveal actually just made for vaguely vulnerable social exchanges. In general, a lot of the things I wanted to lie about were really quite small. I think that often, naming exactly what you’re afraid of makes it seem much less scary.

The truth is moderately bad.

Navigating truths that could hurt others is still really hard for me. Even when the rejections are small, like telling near-strangers I don’t want to be their future roommate, I avoid them. But I realized it’s not less painful or demoralizing to just never hear back from someone than it is to be told directly that they don’t think you’re a good match as roommates. When you don’t say something, you make it more unspeakable.

One thing this study made me face is the fact that we can’t get away with never hurting other people. If I have to inflict hurt, I’d rather it be clear, honest hurt than vague, confused hurt.

The truth is unbearable.

Sometimes, in the more challenging moments of my life, I find myself brushing up against the very edges of the potential realities that feel bearable. I brush up against them, and then it hurts too much and so I turn away. I wrote above about how the truth is not so bad. But sometimes, it is so bad.

Sometimes you love someone and they don’t love you back. Sometimes a dear friend stops being a dear friend, or you’re surrounded by people who don’t really see you, or you’ve made a mistake and you can’t repair the damage. Where it’s possible not to see such truths, we often choose not to see them. Maybe lying is all about trying to spare ourselves and each other from such huge and excruciating heartbreaks.

Some realities are awful. Some truths are unbearable. Yet, whether we look at them directly or not, the truths are the truths. They’re not all-or-nothing. They’re more complicated and, often, more devastating than the lies and the partial-truths we tell. I think that is one of the central undertakings of personhood, to try to expand that scope of realities that we can bear to look at, or live in. When we turn away, to muster all our strength, and turn back. I’m working on turning back.