DEVASTATING EFFECT OF LIES ON A RELATIONSHIP I’ve only had two friends (that I know about) at different times who’ve looked me in the eye and told me painful lies. Both of them were trying to cover up mistakes. I certainly had grace for their mistakes, but I’ve wondered looking back if I didn’t have grace for their lies, i could not stand it because we were getting married. Neither of these two friends are in contact anymore. We don’t talk but we say hi/hello if we suddenly meet on the street. Being in a relationship with somebody who lies is tough. It’s not that you don’t love them or care about them, it’s just that you can’t connect. Without trust, there’s no relationship. Wali Chigozi Bethel said that people lie for one of two reasons. The first is out of shame or fear. Somebody may believe they won’t be accepted if they tell the truth about who they are, so they lie. You can see how religious communities that use shame and fear to motivate might increase a person’s temptation to lie, then. People who lie for this reason can get better and learn to tell the truth. Until they do, however, it’s impossible to connect with them, all the same. The second kind of liar is less fortunate. Some people lie simply because they are selfish, without affection, arrogant and proud. These liars are pathological. They will lie even when it would be easier to tell the truth. Cloud and Townsend warn that we need to stay away from these people. Personally, I think people like this are pretty rare, but I agree, we simply can’t depend on them emotionally or practically. Still I wonder if people who lie understand what they’re doing. I think some people want grace and certainly they can get grace, but when we lie, we make the people we are lying to feel badly about the relationships and about themselves. We like people who make us feel respected, cared about and honored. Lying to somebody communicates the opposite. Here are the things that lies did to my two relationships: 1. Constant lies in your relationship may eventually lead you to fight and breakup. 2. Constant lies in your relationship may eventually lead you to divorce. Marriage is challenging for anyone, but if you are married to a person who lies constantly, your relationship is in danger of eroding. The importance of a bond built on trust cannot be overemphasized, and if you discover that your partner has been leading you on with falsehoods for years, you may feel that you do not even know him. To keep your marriage strong, practice being radically honest with your partner. 3.Lies destroys trust There can be no love without trust. Your relationships can either be strengthened or destroyed by the way you communicate with one another, and if your communication is built on lies, it has no solid foundation. Couples who are married the longest are those who state that their level of trust in their partner is 100 percent. These people recognize the importance of being honest with their partner and always choose the truth over even a white lie. 4. Kills Integrity If you constantly lie to your spouse, you will feel the burden that comes with living a life that lacks integrity. This will cause you general stress and unhappiness, as well as a feeling of disconnect from your partner. Any relationships will begin to feel dry, flat and uninteresting when you choose to avoid upsetting your partner instead of being honest with her. Instead of enjoying the rich existence that comes with honestly interacting with one another, you will feel ashamed and unknown. 5. Wrecks reputation and causes disrespect. Constantly lying to your partner may result in feelings of isolation and a sense of not truly being known. Since the point of a relationship is to self-disclose and find a place of refuge in another person, lying shuts down this function and instead, leads to a feeling of uneasiness and unrest. Because you are not choosing an authentic lifestyle, you will never experience the thrill of being loved for who you really are. Psychology Today reports that this will lead to a relentless and insatiable quest for love. Marital dissatisfaction may be the result, as the desire for love will never be fully satisfied. 6. Causes Divorce Divorce is the most radical of the damaging effects lying has on a relationship, but it is a huge possibility when dishonesty controls a marriage. According to Gunzburg, open communication is essential if you want to restore a marriage and stop divorce; keeping things from your spouse will most likely lead to separation. With trust being fundamental to a healthy relationship, a lack of it may lead to the end of an otherwise fulfilling bond. When my friends lied, I felt disrespected and unimportant. They didn’t seem to care about me or trust me enough to tell the truth. This made me feel bad about myself, as though I were not important or trustworthy enough to be told the truth. • When I found out the extent of one of the lies, I felt like a fool. Technically, my friend didn’t really lie. She just told me “part” of the truth. It was as though she were testing out whether she was safe to be vulnerable. (She told many other lies, but this was just one of them.) But it backfired. When I found out things were worse than she’d made them seem, I felt tricked and deceived. Again, without meaning to, she’d made me feel bad about myself because I felt like somebody who could be conned. • I thought less of my friends. I knew they were willing to “cheat” in relationships. When we lie, we are stealing social commodity without having earned it. People can lie their way into power, and in one instance with a friend, she lied her way into moral superiority. Still, none of the authority or moral superiority (such a thing exists, and while it’s misused, it’s not a bad thing not unlike intellectual superiority or athletic superiority. It just is. An appropriate use of those two examples of superiority might be to lead a team or teach a class.) • I felt sad and lonely. When we think we are getting to know somebody, we are giving them parts of our hearts. But when they lie, we know they’ve actually held back their hearts while we’ve been giving them ours. This made me feel lonely and dumb. • I felt like I couldn’t trust them. The only thing more important than love in a relationship is trust. Trust is the soil love grows in. If there’s not trust, there’s no relationship. When my friends lied, our trust died. As much as I wanted to forgive them, and feel like I did and have, interacting with them was no longer the same. I doubted much of what they said. Sadly, I think both of them began to tell more and more of the truth. But it didn’t matter. Once trust is broken, it’s extremely hard to rebuild. • If they didn’t confess (and in one relationship lied in their confession) I felt like they didn’t care enough about me to come clean and make things right. They were still thinking of themselves. Here’s what didn’t happen. I didn’t think less of them, and while I was angry, I wasn’t angry because I thought they were a bad person. The person who lied probably assumed I felt such things, but I didn’t. What really happened was I felt terrible about myself and when somebody makes us feel bad about ourselves, we tend to get hurt and move away. To be sure, somebody who lies has a lot of other stuff going on and it’s not so easy to come clean. For a liar to change, they need a lot of help. Lying is manipulation, so if a person is a manipulator and gets caught lying, they are most likely going to keep manipulating. They may tell more lies to cover their lies, or manipulate by playing the victim. They may try to find things other people have done that they see as worse and try to make people focus on that. What they will have a hard time doing is facing the truth (which would be the easiest way out of their dilemma. It’s just that they don’t know how to do it. (They’re survivors, scrappers and have learned to cheat to stay alive socially.)
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 11:24:53 +0000
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