Lie to Me

I am usually a pretty laid back person and don’t easily get mad. I feel like life is too short to spend incessant time worrying about trivial things, and I focus more on the bigger picture at hand. However, the one thing that will make me legitimately angry is when people lie to me. I consider myself to be a pretty honest person; sometimes too honest. I am one of those people who is pretty blunt, and if my friends ask for my opinion, I will give it to them regardless of how untactful it sounds. My friends are asking my opinion because they want an honest judgment, not a sugarcoated euphemism. In return, I expect others to do the same for me. I am bringing this up because recently, I was lied to by someone I considered a good friend. What made me the most upset was that the lie was about a really small, trivial thing. It was completely unnecessary, and I wouldn’t have gotten angry if he had told me the truth. And yet he still chose to look me in the eye and lie about it. I don’t understand what’s so hard about telling the truth. This got me thinking about the parts of someone’s identity that causes them to lie to others. Maybe some people lie in order to save their social identities. They might fear that telling someone the truth may break a friendship or hurt someone. Some people may choose to lie to their friends in efforts to protect them from the ugly truth. This could be an attempt at salvaging social relationships.

I’m not exactly a saint, but I try not to lie unless I absolutely have to. It is simply a part of my identity and reflects how I value honesty. The few times I do lie about certain things are generally because I am embarrassed to admit something to others or because I don’t want to hurt someone. But if you think about it, lying to someone doesn’t make the truth any less real. For instance, if someone pretends to be your friend but secretly talks about you behind your back to others, that person is inadvertently lying to you every time you see them. But just because you don’t know that your so-called friend is backstabbing you doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Sure, some people believe ignorance is bliss. They feel like what they don’t know can’t hurt them. Ignorance of lies makes a person only fulfill one part of William James’s definition of identity: the self as a source. Those who ignore the lies around them select what they want to believe to influence their identities. But personally, I feel like those people are living in an imaginary universe and not facing the reality of what is going on. The hurtful things are going on whether you know about them or not! If something is going on that could potentially hurt me, then I want to know about it so I can deal with it and move on.

Additionally, some people lie because they are ashamed of something they did and don’t want others knowing about it, or they fear that others will be angry with what their actions. But in these cases, I feel like no matter how bad of a thing someone did, if they are willing to own upto it and take responsibility for their actions, there is still some hope for them. With time, I can probably forgive the action, but the one thing I cannot forgive is lying. When I have called friends out on lying to me, they have said they did it because they didn’t want to hurt me. To which I always say, if you didn’t want to hurt me, then you shouldn’t have lied to me. What kind of friendship do we have if you don’t even trust me enough to know that I can handle what you have to say?

I apologize for the lengthy and depressing post, I think I just needed a place to vent and this was it.