Why don’t you lie unto others as you would have them lie unto you?

Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true. — Yogi Berra

Itell lies. All the time. Almost always they are small lies. They are not lies told to further my own ends or to maliciously mislead. They are, rather, what I view as steps in the dance that is social discourse. To me, they are innocent — and harmless.

I might act more interested than I really am in something an acquaintance is telling me: most people are more than happy when the conversation turns to them. Or I’ll pay someone a compliment even if it’s slightly disingenuous; I ask myself what I believe another person wants to hear and I say it.

If someone asks me what I think about what she is wearing or has written what I think of her partner, I bear in mind that most of us blossom when kind words are spoken to us.

Some will argue that my behaviour is a form of deception. Perhaps it is. I know there are those who believe it is preferable to say just exactly what is on their mind — even when it is a hurtful thing. I am not one of those people. To me, anyone who defends a slur or an insult with an appended “I’m just being honest” or passes along something unkind that someone has said about you with the qualifier, “I thought you should hear it from me” is behaving in a nasty, and even cruel, way. We have enemies to do that.

An acquaintance spoke at a dinner party once of a shop owner who had told her that he couldn’t stand me. “He just hates you,” she said. This when I was unfailingly courteous to him — I worked in retail for long enough to know how soul-crushing it can be to contend with nasty shoppers — and when I was a regular customer.

It was his prerogative to dislike me, of course. But years later, I still wonder why this woman thought I needed to know.

In Gini Graham Scott’s book Playing the Lying Game (Praeger, 2010), people she interviewed, the women especially, told her that they lied most often to spare someone’s feelings or to make them feel better — the altruistic side of lying, she called it.

Men said they lied most often to enhance their status or achievements.

She described how most of the other reasons people gave for lying had to do with gaining some form of advantage (think Lance Armstrong: doping and then lying) or looking better, with appearing more knowledgeable or improving one’s reputation, with covering up something or hiding a mistake or with keeping a secret or gaining a financial advantage or position in business.

Spend a morning in traffic court to get an idea of how often people lie to evade responsibility or avoid punishment: amazing what people believe they can get away with. And occasionally do.

“And this wasn’t lying, not really. It was leaving out,” Stephen King wrote in Hearts in Atlantis. Depends what you’re leaving out. Say I’m pursuing you — and I neglect to tell you that I’m married. That’s more than leaving out: it’s pretending to be available when I’m not. And that’s a big lie. Huge.

In separate incidents that took place at about the same time, a few friends I had long held dear hurt me deeply by withholding information about personal and romantic entanglements: they did this for reasons known best to them. I appreciate that.

Perhaps they suspected it would change the way I viewed them or alter the parameters of our friendship, and it might have. But so profound was my sense of betrayal on learning, through third parties, of this “leaving out” that I could no longer call them friends.

People lie for their own reasons — and occasionally these are entirely banal: to avoid an activity or gathering, for instance. I know I used to. If I was invited somewhere I didn’t want to go, I’d invariably fabricate a conflicting commitment: I don’t anymore. I just say, “Thanks. I won’t be able to make it.” Very liberating.

If I have had lies on my mind during these early days of 2013, it is because of my resolution to try to be more honest with myself.

“Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others,” the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky observed.

Citing the work of psychologist Daniel Goleman, Scott observes that “we hide things from ourselves to keep ourselves from getting upset about something.”

In ways, of course, this parallels some of the reasons we lie to others.

And I’m perfectly comfortable continuing to tell small and harmless lies that spare the feelings of others and grease the wheels of our social interactions.

But my relationship with myself is more than merely social — and it’s high time I stopped deluding myself about my abilities or my habits, about how I spend my days or what I really want in this life.