Why Do We Lie?
Dishonesty can cost us more than our relationships and reputations – it has grave implications for mental health. Here’s what we lose when we let the truth slip away, and how to restore faith
Inever intended to be a liar, but once you have run away from the truth, you tend to keep running. The truth, I learned, is a line, the lie is a sinker, and you are the fisherman. Your thumb on the reel lets the line go. Once the sinker drops deep enough, it’s hard to reel in.
A decade ago, I said, ‘I do.’ When important questions about our life together inevitably came up – did we want to relocate to the country, or stay in the city? Were our finances better kept apart or together? – I turned away or stayed silent. I started to lie so as not to cause problems. I said what I thought my wife wanted to hear, while I quietly continued to do as I pleased. I started to lie more and more. First came the lies, then the lie that I was not a liar.
I racked up black holes of credit card debt on the sly. I nodded along as I listened to her reveries about a place in the country, knowing that I would never move out of New York. With every conversation avoided, every charge unaccounted for, the bonds of our union frayed. ‘Lies make intimacy impossible,’ says Dr Charles Ford, a professor who wrote perhaps the most important work in the liar’s canon, Lies! Lies! Lies! (It’s all about lies.)
Once you start ghosting the truth, your compensatory lies can’t help but ripple outward. That’s what Neil
Garrett, a cognitive neuroscientist at Oxford, calls the slippery slope. In a study, he found that the amygdala, which is active when you initially lie, responds less and less with every passing prevarication. ‘What begins with small acts of dishonesty can escalate,’ says Garrett, leading him to conclude, ‘The brain generates less of an emotional response each time we lie, and that enables more dishonesty.’
When the reckoning came, all of the line had been let out and it snapped. There was nothing to do but think and be still, sad and sorry. I have a different relationship with honesty these days. I keep the line taut and hew to the truth. Yet the memory and consequences of dishonesty linger, in custody calendars and self-flagellation. There’s a part of me that’s still lost. Do all liars fare as I did? These three men have wrestled with truth, found themselves adrift and had to find home. The answer, they discovered and I continue to discover, is that honesty is hard.
‘What begins with small acts of dishonesty can escalate’