Yes, I am.
But are there degrees of lying? I’ve not told any whoppers that I recall, and I’ve always believed honesty is the best policy. However, I’ve told white lies—the ones not of much importance but are aimed to spare someone’s feelings. For me, these usually fall into the category of not wanting to go somewhere.
For instance, I remember back in college a guy asked me out for a Friday night, and I told him I was going home for the weekend. Not true. He seemed like a nice guy, was handsome, but I wasn’t interested and didn’t want to spend an evening making small talk, so I told a white lie. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I don’t remember his name, but in my mind’s eye, I can flash to standing on the sidewalk outside the student union when he asked, and I still feel shame about outright lying to him.
Recently the topic of white lies came up when I was with high school friends. I’d just uttered a truth, but not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I said I was going somewhere, but I didn’t say when I was going. And it wasn’t at that moment. Again, it was a white lie to get myself out of a situation I didn’t want in and to save the other person’s feelings. Is a partial truth like that lying?
Do too many white lies make someone less trustworthy? If you witness your friend telling someone else what you know is a white lie, do you wonder if they sometimes lie to you?
Most of my life, I’ve felt compelled to give the whole truth—a reason I couldn’t go somewhere. In the last few years, I’ve gone to the extreme. An example: A good friend had free tickets to a local concert and asked me to go along with a couple women I’d met but didn’t know well. I said yes, since I didn’t have a good excuse, but on that day, dread settled over me, and I felt more and more uneasy. I called her and said I didn’t want to go. I carried it a bit too far and made the analogy that I’d rather be locked in a windowless black room, lying on a bed one foot from the ceiling than go to that concert. Since I was a fairly new widow, she understood that I needed to be alone and was not offended.
Some years ago, Jim and I were expecting a friend over on a winter’s evening, but he called and bowed out. He’d come home tired from a construction site, built up the fire in the wood stove, showered, then called and said, “I’m sitting in my underwear in front of the fire, and I want to put on my pajama pants instead of a pair of jeans. I don’t want to go back out in the cold.”
“I get that,” I said. It wasn’t a big deal. He didn’t white lie, just told how he felt.
Do women white lie more than men?
One friend told me if someone asks her to go somewhere she doesn’t want to go, she says she already has plans. Those plans could be eating popcorn alone in front of the TV, but that’s a plan. So far, no one has pinned her down and asked her what her plans were.
I think I’ll adopt her idea and forego the white lies.
