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UllrsIshtar -> RE: Scratching the surface (8/16/2012 10:06:40 PM)
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I believe everybody lies. I trust people who claim they never lie even less than I do people who can admit to lying sometimes.
That being said, I don't believe everybody necessarily lies about the big things, but everybody has little omissions, or embellishments, or white lies they tell not meaning harm, or that just come out to cover up their own insecurity. Most everybody also has, at some point in their lives, fucked up and lied about a big thing to a person they cared about and hurt that person badly.
What I care about is not that people lie, but how they lie, and why they lie, and most importantly, how they deal with the lie after the truth has come out. Somebody who stubbornly hold on to a lie after the truth has come to light, instead of dealing with their fuck up, fixing the mistake and moving on earns no respect from me in the process. On the other hand, a person who can honorably deal with the aftermath of a lie, own up to it, and set out to set things right while learning something in the process, can earn a great deal of my respect while doing so.
I personally try not to lie. I consider it an extremely bad habit that gets worse the more you practice it. That being said, who I'm lying to matters a lot to me in deciding how much I care about lying to them. I more rigorously attempt to be honest to people close to me than I am with strangers, to the point of really not having qualms at all about lying to strangers in the right set of circumstances.
In relationships I expect lies to happen sometimes, especially in the initial courtship period when everybody is trying to present themselves just a little better than they are. What I don't tolerate in relationship are malicious lies, that had the intend of causing harm. Lies of insecurity, vanity, impulse, embellishment or defensiveness I can easily get passed, provided the person deals with them in the appropriate manner after being caught.
quote:
ORIGINAL: JeffBC
Carol is much, much more honest and honorable than me (for the record, she quibbles with that statement ... or at least feels it doesn't capture the whole truth). But I have definitely lied to her in non-trivial ways. It's a guaranteed fact that I could not (and would not want to try) to measure up to the standards of honesty normally discussed on these boards. "Doing good" is higher on my priority tree than "telling the truth". And then... of course, there's always the just plain bad decisions.
I don't know what to tell you. I suspect it was the thoroughness of the recovery after the fuck-up that made it seem like not such a big deal to her. I know that most people here have standards of truthfulness that I do not meet. I don't think of myself as particularly honest. I think I'm a real mixed bag truthfully. I'm generally good but I fail sometimes. I'm generally nice but there's an almost sociopathic core underneath that truly does not place much intrinsic value on human life. I make friends readily and resist making enemies but I am ruthless with my enemies seeking maximum aggression as quickly as possible.
If I remember, when Carol gets back from travelling I'll see if I can get her to post and answer why on god's green earth does she trust me?
I can tell you for me personally I don't have all that much interest in people's fuck-ups assuming they are not a commonly recurring event. I'm WAY more interested in how they recover from them. That's where I think I can actually measure someone's strength and honor. That's why I wouldn't divorce Carol even if she cheated on me (doubly damned on both marital and M/s angles). I'd be VERY closely attuned to how she handled herself in the recovery period though.
Hell yes on all of this... since when are you my ghost writer Jeff?
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