Chapter One
When Your Lover is a Liar
The Labyrinth of Lying
*You answer the phone to hear a woman on the other end say, "Is this Betty? I thought it was time you knew that your husband and I have been seeing each other for the past two years. He doesn't love you. Why don't you just let him go?"
*You get a notice from the bank that a check you wrote has bounced. You indignantly call the bank, certain that you have eight or ten times that amount in the account you share with your husband. You're told you're overdrawn--and you know you didn't spend all the money.
*Your live-in lover swears he's stopped drinking and has been attending AA meetings regularly--and then you find a bottle of Scotch hidden in his tool chest.
Suddenly you've got vertigo. The world you thought you knew is spinning. Your mind races: Who is this person I thought I could trust? How many other lies have there been? You've been socked in the stomach. You don't know if you have a future with this man--and you wonder if you can believe anything he said in the past. All you know for certain is this: Your lover is a liar.
At this agonizing, bewildering time, finding a rational response is crucial--an important relationship hangs in the balance, and so does your own well-being. Yet no matter how alert we may be, most of us have no idea what steps to take when we encounter lies on this most intimate ground. Most of us don't have a clue about how to confront and counter the poison of a lover's lie. Faced with the disorientation of deception and betrayal, we tend to bounce between two extremes: we may deny and rationalize away our partner's behavior, or become so enraged we can't think. People who care about us may be yelling "Dump him!"--and we turn ballistic, losing our perspective in a fit of anger. Neither path brings us peace or lasting satisfaction.
All too often our lovers' lies leave us paralyzed. We find ourselves unable to make even the simplest decisions with our partners, because trust has disappeared, and we don't know when or if they are telling us the truth. We don't know what's real anymore, and we suffer terribly. A relationship with a liar can destroy our self-respect and our ability to trust our own perceptions and judgments. In the worst instances, an otherwise loving woman can become bitter, guarded, and walled-off, afraid to open her heart for fear of being betrayed again.
A friend of mine recently summed up the dilemma many a woman has faced: "I trusted my boyfriend more than I've ever trusted anyone," she told me, "and then I found out he was still sleeping with an old girlfriend while he was telling me he loved me. I'm afraid I can never trust another man again."
Lying by a lover is frequently one of the most destructive forces in a woman's life.
But it doesn't have to be.
There is a way through the labyrinth of lying in love relationships, and I'd like to give you a map to this subterranean world within a world. In the pages that follow, I will deal with the full range of lies, from the benign to the lethal, and introduce you to the many varieties of liars--from those who'd never admit what they're doing to the chronic confessors who encourage us to forgive and forget. I'll also give you a detailed profile of the one kind of liar you must leave immediately.
I will show you some of the forces that drive men to lie, how they behave, and how to stop them early on. In the second half of this book, I will give you specific communication skills and behavioral strategies that will go a long way toward helping you reground a relationship in honesty or, when that is not possible, decide when to leave a partner who lies. Whatever your situation, I will help you identify your best course of action, and I will support you through the process of bringing truth, self-trust, and intimacy back into your life.
A Diagram of Deception
The words lie and liar are ugly. It's heartbreaking to have to use them to describe someone you love or are interested in, because they're loaded with pain and anger. They put you face-to-face with betrayal and malevolence when what you thought you had was intimacy. The words themselves are so inflammatory that it's important not to use them casually.
Certainly not every man is a liar, not every liar is a man, and not every thoughtless act is a lie. But in this book I'm focusing specifically on men who lie to women because I've seen how resistant women tend to be to acknowledging that the men they love lie to them. Women suffer uniquely when lies pop up in a relationship because, as we'll see, when a man lies to a woman, both of them blame her.
When I use the word liar, I'm not talking about men who mislead us inadvertently (because of oversights or misunderstandings) or with optimistic but unrealistic promises (like "I'll meet you at six" when they're not sure they can even get off work before seven).
And I'm not talking about the harmless little white lies that we all tell or shading the truth to protect a person from something painful. Most of us use flattery and exaggeration in our day-to-day interactions, and life could be pretty cruel if we didn't. The whole truth and nothing but the truth is fine in the courtroom, but we all try to soften otherwise harsh realities. We meet a friend we haven't seen in a few years and diplomatically say, "You look great--you haven't changed a bit," even as we're thinking, "God, you've got jowls just like your mother's, and the same bad taste in clothes." Do our words convey the whole truth? Of course not. But is a lie like this worth worrying about? I don't think so.