On Lying to Me

You will not lie to me about anything large. Men rarely do. What you will do, and what nearly all of you do at least once, is leave a small thing out and let me build on the gap.

You tell me you managed the whole week. You did not, quite. You tell me you have not spoken to anyone else. You have, once, briefly, and it came to nothing, and you decided that nothing did not need mentioning.

I want to be precise about why this matters, because it is not the reason you are bracing for.

I am not wounded. You have not damaged me. What you have done is far duller than that and rather worse for you: you have made everything I say afterwards slightly less useful. I answer the man you describe. If the description is edited, my attention lands somewhere just to the left of you, and you sit there receiving something meant for a man who does not exist, wondering why it does not quite reach.

That is the whole cost. Not my displeasure. Just a slow, private disappointment that you paid for something and then quietly arranged not to receive it.

And I usually know. Not because I am clever, but because the omission has a shape. You go brisk. You answer the question I asked rather than the one underneath it. You become helpful.

So tell me the unflattering half. It is smaller out loud than it is in your head, and I have heard it before, from better liars than you.

Then we can get on with it.