How to have an honest marriage
by Mira and Charles on March 3rd, 2010Putting a stop to lying in your relationship
In a recent blog, Married? Don’t lie!, we answered questions from a journalist about what happens when there is lying in a marriage. And we promised we would follow up with some tested advice for what to do if there has already been lying in your marriage. And so here goes. And it’s important, because lying can kill love.
OK, so here you are and it seems that one or both of you has been telling some real lies. Like the guy who waited weeks before telling his wife that he’d been laid off. The woman who tried to hide from her husband the fact that she’d lent ten thousand bucks to her sister’s no-good husband. The guy who, it turned out, was lying about not being in contact with his ex. The woman who kept lying about how much she spend on clothes. And on and on it goes.
So how do you get off this train?
Here’s how.
You gotta stop lying about lying. Both of you. And the only way to do that that works is to stop being judgmental about the lying. Anger and scolding are just part of the problem, as you’ll see, and they shut down problem solving. Instead, just say something like, “Look, I know you’ve lied to me, and I don’t want to yell at you. I just want us to talk about how we can have a more honest relationship. I want to find a way to make honesty work for both of us.”
Then you gotta do something that’s going to seem a little crazy. You gotta begin by looking at what the person who’s been lied to has been doing wrong. I know. That’s the good guy. Shouldn’t we be looking at the liar? But you see, here’s the thing. Lying is fear. People lie because they are afraid to tell the truth. It may be a habit or a carry-over from childhood or a reaction to the way you have freaked out when your partner has told you the truth, but it’s still based on fear.
And so the lied-to person has to say, “What do I do to make it hard for you to tell me the truth?” Now even though it might seem like with this question you’re taking the blame, you’re actually laying a brilliant trap. A good, healing trap, but a trap nonetheless. Because, you see, once the poor sucker has told you what makes it hard for him to tell you the truth, you can proceed to take away those objections.
The biggest objection is usually, “Because you’ll get upset.” OK, fine. So you have to show either that you won’t get upset if he tells the truth or that you will be much less upset if he tells the truth than if he lies.
And this means that there is a brilliant trap for you too. Because the fact is, the truth is, a lot of people don’t get much less upset if they’re told an unwelcome truth than if they’d been lied to about that truth. In fact, they just have two modes: not being upset (because they haven’t heard anything very challenging) or very upset (because they’ve heard anything at all that’s upsetting).
Now let’s tell the truth about this. What is the cost of lying to me if you get really upset whether I tell the truth or lie? I might as well lie, because I might not get caught.
I know. I know. People should just tell the truth. I get it.
But we’re already talking about a relationship with lying in it! Waving the flag is not the solution. Solving the problem is the solution. And the problem is that one person will always be under-truthful if the other is over-reactive. That’s just the way it is.
So now you’ve both fallen into the trap and you both see that you’ve both contributed to the problem. And the solution is for the one who has been lied to to make it easy for her partner to tell the truth. And she can do that by making sure that there is a BIG difference in how she reacts depending on whether she hears the truth or not. If your partner tells you the truth about something, no matter how challenging, THANK him for telling you the truth. Now if this a frustrating truth to hear, SAY it’s frustrating calmly without getting all upset and everything.
And if you do that, you will SEE the truth: whether your partner is being honest when he says he wants to tell the truth or not. If he DOES tell the truth when he CAN tell the truth, then the problem is with the way you used to respond. But if he DOESN”T tell the truth even after you’ve made it easy for him, well, then he’s just a lying liar.
There’s a lot more about this is the classic Our Love Is Too Good to Feel So Bad. Please check it out. And if you want to see where to draw the line, when your partner’s lying makes better for you to leave your relationship, you must read Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay.
