Last week, I was issued a challenge: go for seven whole days without telling a lie. No lies of omission, no little baby white lies, no exaggerations, and certainly no great big stonking “I promise not to invade Czechoslovakia” lies. None. I have always considered myself to be a very honest person, and so confidently accepted. Easy-peasy, I thought! But dear reader, I have to tell you, I failed quite spectacularly. I didn’t even last the week.
It started when I was having dinner with a Dutch friend of mine – let’s call her Helga – and decided against having dessert. “Is that because you have put on weight?” she asked me. “I was thinking that you look bigger than the last time we met.”
This is not the first time Helga’s brutal honesty landed like a punch to the gut, but I knew from experience that this was not being said maliciously. This was the no-nonsense directness that the Dutch are famous for, and it can often catch others off guard. In the past, she has also flatly told me that “no” she did not like the shirt I was wearing, and that “no” she did not want to hug me goodbye because the perfume I was wearing smelled “quite terrible”.
The Dutch call this “bespreekbaarheid” (speakability), and it means that nothing should be unsaid, and no topic is off limits. The British, on the other hand, value being polite, which we associate primarily with not causing offence. It’s not that a British person wouldn’t have thought “Kate has definitely piled on the timber”, but they almost certainly wouldn’t have pointed that out to me. No, they would have waited until they got home and then told other people. That’s just good manners.
Helga was wrong, by the way. I didn’t refuse dessert because I was trying to lose weight. I turned it down because I had already had cake before I got there and was too full to have anymore. (She might have been right about the weight gain.)
But this did spark a very interesting conversation around honesty. “Ah, so I have done it again, yes?” Helga asked when I pointed out the comment around my weight was more than a little rude. I find Helga to be abrasive sometimes, but it turns out that she finds British culture utterly baffling and really struggles to determine what we “actually mean” because “you all lie so much”.
Feeling a sense of nationalism swell within me, I was fast to defend my fellow countrymen and point out that we don’t lie, we just don’t say mean things for no reason! It was then that Helga threw down the gauntlet and challenged me to go for one whole week without telling any fibs, not even to be polite. “No problem at all,” I scoffed. It turned out that this was the first lie of many.
Lying is bad. That is something that we can all agree upon. It’s what we tell little kids, and yet, that in itself is a lie because the vast majority of us engage in deception every single day. Research has shown that most of us lie on average twice a day. And, to be honest, I think most of them are lying about that! Only twice, really?
Lying is so much a part of our everyday social interactions that people who find it difficult to lie and/or to recognise when other people are lying can be at a serious disadvantage. Many people with autism spectrum disorder, for example, can struggle with this.
I know what you’re thinking: “I don’t tell lies, Kate.” And that’s what I thought too. But I do not mean big lies, like lying to your partner about cheating on them, tax evasion, or misleading parliament. I would hope most of us are not telling those kinds of lies twice a day. No, I mean the everyday little lies we tell to avoid hurting someone else’s feelings, because those are the ones that really tripped me up.
I made it through the first couple of days OK. There was an awkward moment when a cashier asked me how my day was going, and I honestly told them “badly” because my HRT patch had fallen off at the gym. But that encounter aside, I found myself rather enjoying such radical honesty. “No, I do not have time for a market survey.” “No, I do not want to hear about my lord and saviour Jesus Christ.” No polite excuses, just a fat and firm, no. I didn’t want to.
I told the dentist the truth about how much fizzy pop I drink instead of seriously underplaying it. She didn’t shout and scream. She just told me, “It’s not ideal”, which is fair enough. I told the mechanic that it was me who smashed the wing-mirror off my car when I drove into a bollard, instead of making something up about there being “a lot of maniacs out there”. He didn’t bat an eyelid. For a chronic people-pleaser like me, this was absolutely liberating. I was on a roll.
But these interactions were all with strangers. The real test came from friends, family, and work colleagues. The first big one: did I want to come to a Christmas party being organised at a company I used to work for? “Everyone would love to see you.” Oh. Dear. God. No. This question arrived in the form of a text message and until this week, I would have made up an excuse. Could I answer this question honestly and just say that I didn’t want to go because I hate office parties and wouldn’t enjoy it?
The answer to that is no. I couldn’t do it. I just didn’t want to upset or cause any kind of offence to the thoroughly lovely person who was offering me something so well-intended and good-natured. I drafted and deleted so many different responses in an effort to stay on my honest streak, but I simply could not say what I actually thought. I didn’t want to go because I would rather eat my own feet than attend this event you have so kindly organised. So, I made up an excuse. “Thank you for the lovely invite but I am busy that day. Have a great time. Let’s catch up soon.” Lies. Lies. Lies.
I suppose we would call this kind of dishonesty a “little white lie”. They are the ones we tell so we don’t cause harm to the person being lied to. Often, we tell them to stop feelings being hurt or to make the other person feel better. These aren’t antisocial lies, but they are lies nonetheless, and it seems I am a pathological little white liar.
Having failed so easily, I didn’t see much point in carrying on the experiment and stopped. Helga was right. I am not as honest as I thought I was. However, my efforts at radical honesty have made me more mindful of all the white lies I tell, and I am trying to cut down.
I have also arrived at the conclusion that lying isn’t always wrong. In fact, sometimes it is essential. Should a serial killer break into your home and ask you where your family is hiding, that is not the time for honesty. However, for mundane, everyday social interactions, I think we could all afford to be more honest than we are. We could be more Dutch.
When I tell white lies, I like to think it’s to protect the person being lied to, but that’s not quite true either. It’s to protect myself from what they might think of me if I was to tell the truth. It’s rooted in an insecurity within myself, and I am trying to work on that. I don’t know if I will ever be able to tell the truth with the conviction of a Dutch person, but I am going to try and do so with the conviction of an anxious English woman with something to prove.
If you are reading this and thinking that you could easily go for a week without telling any lies, I say go right ahead. Consider this my challenge to you. I don’t think very many of us would succeed, but I do think you will learn a lot about yourself in the process.
Honestly, you will.
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