The deep danger of the little white lie

Several years ago I was charged with booking the family ski vacation so it had a particular sting when my mother was decidedly unimpressed with the accommodations.

“Can’t we cancel and find somewhere else?” she asked. No, I told her as patiently as possible, we could not. We could just cancel and look for a hotel or something. Or we could pay a lot more for a lot bigger place. But almost everything was booked, the weather was terrible, and we were already unpacking; far past the 24 hour notice required to cancel without paying for it.

“Can’t we just tell him it’s an emergency? We’ll tell him the baby got sick and that we had to go home. That’s what babies are for.”

My eyebrows reacted before I could stop them and I shot a look at my sister, holding her 2 year old daughter in her lap.

In some version of self defense I want to admit that I knew - even in the moment the flames of anger rose up my cheeks - that my embarrassment was, in part, about the fact that I’d chosen an AirBnB that was unacceptable to my mother. I’d allowed my imagination to run wild with images of enjoying a glass of wine in the hot tub that sat on the side of the river after a long day of skiing with my sister - and I’d run right along with it.

It wasn’t just the embarrassment though. It was the suggestion that we could lie. That we could leverage my sister’s toddler as a reason to manufacture a manipulation of the owner of the river side cabin so that there *might* be a *possibility* that he would allow us to leave the premesis two days early and refund the money to my father’s credit card.

Look, I get it. I realize that it’s just a “little white lie”. Nobody really gets hurt, right? (Well, accept me, but that’s my fault and responsibility entirely.)

Except that I think people DO get hurt.

Several months ago, a dear friend of mine had re-entered the dating game after almost a decade on the bench. She hadn’t consciously chosen to excuse herself from dating; quite the contrary, in fact. So when she found herself with a couple of men interested in dating her, she was delighted. And determined not to jump into a commitment with any one man.

For years we’d discussed the importance of clear, open communication, and the way that it could help to create a solid foundation for a relationship. We’d talked about how she could work to drop her “nice, mid-western girl” conditioning; stop worrying so much about hurting people’s feelings and just be honest.

So I was somewhat surprised when she told me that she’d lied to one of the men about the reason she couldn’t see him one night.

“The truth is, I had a date with another man,” she told me. “But I didn’t want to tell him that so I made up an excuse about having dinner with my sister.”

“Why?” I pressed, genuinely curious.

“I dunno,” she confessed.

“Maybe you were afraid that if you told him you were dating someone else he would end the relationship?”

“No, because I’d already told him I’m dating other people.”

“Ok. Well maybe it doesn’t really matter why you didn’t want to tell him that, but as your friend, I want to make sure that it isn’t because you were afraid to be honest about your feelings.”

“Mmmm,” she mused, uncertain.

As I narrated to her, I personally don’t care at all what she says or to whom or why. She is a grown-ass woman, fully capable of living her own life. But as an empowerment coach, it makes me wonder why we think that misleading someone - even on the most superficial level - is ok.

Of course I wholly acknowledge that it doesn’t matter if Dude #1 thought she was having dinner with her sister instead of another man. She was clear about the fact that she was dating other people, and perhaps she just didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

But I think there’s more to these kinds of situations than we realize.

First of all, I think that it might be useful for Dude #1 to know that she was out on a date with another guy because it shows him the reality that she’s doing exactly what she says she’s doing: dating other people. That might be useful information for him, it may give him an emotional response that would help him be clear about what he does or doesn’t want from his relationship with her.

Secondly, it calls into question the line between little white lie and big fat red one. If Dude #1 found out later beacuse my friend forgot that she lied to him and let it slip somehow, or because a mutual friend might have seen her out with someone else, or whatever - she has now seeded a distrust. Sure it wasn’t a big lie to her… but how will he know in the future if she’s late for a date beacause she really did get caught up at work, or for some other, more shadowy reason?

Thirdly, if the relationship with Dude #1 were to progress, and my friend has created a habit of telling little white lies to protect his feelings, how will she transition out of that? Of course she could, but won’t it be more painful for him to discover that she isn’t always going to protect his feelings after months of thinking she’ll never hurt him?

Perhaps most important, however, is the reality that when we tell these little white lies, we undermine our personal power. Energetically we’re telling ourselves that our words can’t be trusted. So when we’re working to manifest something in our lives, our deep self knows that we don’t mean what we say. WE know we don’t necessarily mean what we say. What’s more, telling a little white lie under the guise of protecting someone else’s feelings is a message to ourselves that our truth is less important than the way someone else *might* feel. It says, “I can’t honestly share myself because it might hurt someone else.” And that suggests that it’s not safe or ok for us to BE ourselves.

Eventually, all these little inconsistencies end up as the buildling blocks of a wall between who we really are and the version of ourselves that we put out into the world. They may be little bricks, but they just as effectively build the wall. Without even realizing it, we end up creating an ego-based version of ourselves that is “perfect” in our perception of what we think the outside world might see in us, and we hide behind it. Effectively preventing people from knowing the real us, and - perhaps more disturbingly - distancing ourselves from our own acknowledged truth of who we really are.

These are the belief systems that go skittering across the surface of my consciousness as I sit on the couch across from my mother in the less-than-awesome AirBnB. Obviously, we are not likely to have any kind of long term relationship with the man who owns this property. But aren’t these kinds of manipulations the underpinnings of the wildly distrustful society in which we live? Aren’t these the very reasons we have little things like ridiculous cancellation policies that charge us exorbitant fees when genuine emergencies happen? Because we have come to believe that everyone is going to try to manipulate the system, get away with something, squeeze us for an extra buck?

If we are going to change our world into one where it’s truly safe for us to be who we really are; if we want to create a society in which we can trust each other not to take advantage of us, we have to start with honesty. Real honesty. We have to stop pretending that it’s ok to tell a little white lie.