Lies

(Reprinted from the blog My Life As A Serial Dater.)

I did a bad thing.  I lied to Todd.  I told him Lynn was taking me to the airport, when I was really going to meet The Beautiful One.  I didn't think about it again after I sent the false text.  I just sent it and went about my evening.

I started this blog because I wanted to be held to the truth.  I wanted to work on being the most honest me I could be and I wanted to be accountable when I strayed from the truth.  I am not a liar, I don't make a habit of telling lies and I don't use lies to make my life more convenient, because in the end, they make everything more murky and they just make things worse.  That's exactly what happened.

The moment of truth came when I sent Todd a text that was just a heart and he responded by asking why I had lied to him.  He had read a blog post that contradicted something I had told him. This was what I was looking for from the blog.  Eventually, I would be thankful that he called me out.  But, my first reaction was to say "shit." It was a combination of "Why did I lie?" and "Dammit, I'm busted."

The question that has reared it's ugly head since the inception of this blog is "When is honesty good and when is it just cruel?"  When am I just telling too much?  I think this is frequently the problem with total honesty and it's often the justification for lies.  "If I tell her/him I cheated, it will break her/his heart."  So, I lie.  That's not valid.  I think that we enter a sticky territory when we start to play with honesty, molding it to save feelings.  I am still not sure how I feel about confessing an affair to clear your own conscience, but that's not the issue here.  I didn't have to lie.  This blog frees me from lies.  I don't ever tell a man that he is the only one.  Lying was a bad decision.

Todd and I have both been hurt by lies and he is probably the one person that knows, first hand, how I feel on the subject of honesty.  I think about that lie every day.  Whether it was a 'small lie' or a 'white lie,' it demonstrated my ability to lie.  And I know how destructive that can be.

Moral of the story, I find lies intolerable.  Whether the violation is committed by me or someone I care about, it will not be permitted in my life.  I've decided to be open and honest.  It's an everyday battle.  Until we really face it head on, we don't realize how big a part of our lives lying really is. I would like to take this moment to apologize to Todd and to the rest of you.  I am far from perfect, but I am working on being good, at the very least.

by Poly Amory