Liar Liar

You may have noticed that my advice/observations/stories are not strictly for romantic relationships. Maybe it seems weird to talk about familial or platonic love on a kinky blog but to me it’s hard to completely separate these ideas. Because when you love someone, in any type of way, you should respect them.

And if you respect them, you shouldn’t lie to them. Now, everybody lies. But I am about 90% sure I lie less than average. I almost never lie, although I have a habit of omitting the truth when I’m trying to avoid a fight. Something that has caused fights in itself.

There’s no prescribed plan with non-monogamy. When you lose the guardrails of societal expectations all of a sudden there’s a lot of room for misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Dakota’s brain works differently than mine. When we would talk about boundaries and scenarios and tried to cover our bases on what might happen as we introduce new partners (lol, we had no idea what might happen) he would assume anything we hadn’t talked about was a strict red flag, absolutely not, shut it down and wait til we have a chance to revisit the conversation. I would interpret it as something that doesn’t cross any of the boundaries we’ve laid out so it’s fine, right?

We’ve changed how we talk about things after having some bad experiences with this. But when things like this would happen I’d often omit some of the truth if it seemed like the tone of the conversation was negative. I don’t explicitly lie, but I leave out some details that seem unnecessarily hurtful. And I still believe that is the right move sometimes…

But I was better able to understand the problem with “lies by omission” when Ryan started doing it to me. The big one that I got over fast and then realized I’m actually not over was going to Spain with Sara. That was a hell of a detail to leave out and I think an obvious sign he hadn’t been clear enough that reconciliation was indisputably off the table. To be honest I’m not sure it actually fully 100% was indisputably off the table until this past week but whatever. That’s for another time.

All of his lies by omission were Sara related and although we’ve gotten into it over them… I kinda get it. Not just because I’ve omitted the truth to keep the peace, but also knowing who he’s been married to. I kind of assume he’s spent the last decade and a half just. Trying. To keep. The peace.

I baked him his favorite cupcakes and brought them to his work for his birthday. I didn’t see him when I dropped them off because this was about a week before he actually moved out. It was made clear to me by him and by Dakota I should not see him one second before he moved out (and I didn’t. I saw him about one hour after he signed a lease and got the keys and we fucked on the floor of his empty apartment but it was his apartment). Because he lived at home I assumed the cupcakes would make it home with him. I joked that his kid could have them but not Sara. I didn’t want her to have any but I didn’t actually expect him to keep them from her, that would cause an unnecessary fight.

“I cannot take these home lol”

“What? Just say someone else made them.”

“There’s a lady here that bakes everyone cookies for their birthday. When I brought those home it was a problem.”

Ah. Yeah. So an inordinate amount of his time has been spent trying to keep her from blowing up his phone or blocking him or yelling in front of their child because she’s a psychopath and clearly there were some habits that needed to be broken with me. Which I’ve said. He got defensive very quickly with me one time about something that honestly wasn’t that big of a deal and I texted him, “I know you’re used to her inability to calmly communicate. I’m trying to be patient with you learning how to talk to me. But I’m not her. Don’t talk to me like I’m her.”

So while I’ve been trying to break him of his lying by omission, Dakota had been doing the same to me. I guess I’m a hypocrite. But what I can say with my whole chest is that I basically never explicitly lie. What I’ve learned in my almost three decades of life is that lying is never the answer.

Don’t lie to your partner. Don’t lie to your friends. Don’t lie to your parents or your kids. Don’t lie at an interview. Don’t lie at a traffic stop. Don’t lie about who you’re texting. Don’t lie about the location of your child. Don’t lie about going to a funeral because you have other plans? Don’t lie about being domestically abused (holy fuck how big of a piece of shit do you have to be to lie about that? I’m not trying to take away from real victims at all but to lie about that??) or call the police on someone for being armed when they’re not. THAT’S HOW PEOPLE DIE.

I hate liars. Hate hate hate hate hate liars. It irritates me to no end to see a compulsive liar that seemingly has everyone fooled. But what I’ve learned over that last couple of years is they don’t have everyone fooled. Most people know they’re liars and instead of confronting them they just stay away. It always comes to light. They lose all their friends and drive away their family. They get alienated from their coworkers. They get in trouble with the law.

Everyone lies. I wouldn’t call everyone a liar. Don’t be a liar, don’t date a liar, don’t raise a liar.