Why Men Lie (and always will)
by Vince Passaro
Originally appeared in March 2004 issue of GQ Magazine
the essay also appears in the book The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood, and Freedom
Before I pulled my Roberto Duran, before I moved out, before I lost the ability to go forward in what had been a long and rich and difficult and painful and profoundly rewarding marriage with three great children—before I lost the strength and desire, to put the matter more precisely, to try to be the person I was supposed to be and hide the one I’d become, I asked my wife: “Why do men lie so much?” I can see now that the long pondering I’d been doing on the subject of men and lies was a circling-the-airport approach to where I might land, which was my own conscience.
“Your sperm makes you evil,” my wife said. “It does something to your minds.”
“No, seriously,” I said.
“Because you’re all cowards,” she said.
“That’s a little too serious,” I said. “Do you have anything between the two?”
“In between the two,” she said, “is just a charred landscape.”
********
There are things that everyone almost always lies about (cheating, stealing, sex), and there are things that women almost always lie about (food, money, orgasms), and then there’s the rest of life, which generally comprises what men tend to lie about. A female friend says of the men she’s known: “Are its lips moving? Then it’s lying.”
I’m talking about the issue later at a party with a fellow I’ve met (during this period I talked about it a lot with many people—friends, acquaintances, and people, like this guy, that I’d just met); he plays poker, sometimes for a living, other times merely competitively—this is very high-stakes poker. Average annual American college-grad salaries frequently rest on the table. Games can go on for more than twenty-four hours. Someday, it’s my guess, he’ll get close to a woman who doesn’t want him to play this kind of poker or, in fact, since this is the only kind of poker that he’s interested in, any poker at all. He’ll promise not to, and then he’ll join the eternal cycle.
“Men pretty much always lie to avoid conflict, argument, the airing of unpleasant truths,” he says, in a jovial, unmarried way. “It’s been my impression that both parties are pleased with the outcome.”
“Kind of like your attitude toward Homeland Security and the Patriot Act,” I say.
“Exactly. The less we know, the better. The media understand this perfectly, that’s why they tell us so little. And we’re grateful. Like our girlfriends are.”
He’s half-right: to avoid unpleasantness is one reason we lie, a frequent reason, but not “pretty much always” the reason. Another woman, married, hearing the topic, says, “You have to talk to my husband. He’s Italian.”
She means native-bon, from-Italy Italian. “That’s a whole different league,” I say. “We can’t even begin to compete.”
“I know,” she says. “Isn’t it incredible? I asked him once, why do you lie all the time? Always? Why do you feel the need to do that? And he told me, ‘Because it feels like I’ve gotten away with something. It’s a kind of power.’”
That is it, of course, in a nutshell. It’s a struggle for power. If we choose to win by brute force, we will go to jail. We cannot (some of us) allow ourselves to lose, but our partners frequently are relentless—they will never, ever surrender. Therefore, we lie.
******************
“You’re a man, you lie because you don’t want to get caught,” a male friend of mine says. This is my wife’s “coward” theory put plain. Questions such as why we have to avoid being “caught,” or who the “catcher” is, or, most pressing in the long run, how the hell she got appointed to that position, don’t need to be answered. The answer, like Chomsky’s syntax, seems to be built structurally into our brains.
My friend is a writer, fairly successful, which, in that field, isn’t saying much. “You lie because you don’t want the lecture, the dirty look, the new entry in the catalogue of never forgotten betrayals”—he goes into an imitation-girlfriend voice—“‘This is just like when I needed you that time when I was using your car and it wouldn’t start and they were going to tow me and you were out at that bar with your friend…or whoever it was.’” My friend and I ourselves are in a bar for this conversation. He lights a cigarette, though technically speaking he’s “not smoking” right now.
He says, “Now you need a translation. ‘Your car’ means even though she had it, it was your problem, which is as it should be, and very satisfying too—because one of the underlying struggles that will last until the final moments of the relationship and even slightly beyond is whether she ever actually ought to face a crisis alone. I mean, what’s the point of enduring a man in your life if he’s not willing to be called in like an EMS driver every time something goes wrong?
“And ‘that bar’ means a place utterly bereft of value or interest to any decent member of the human species except you, an utterly squalid spot on the map of your life, to which only your most depraved and disreputable self is ever drawn.
“Now the highly nuanced ‘whoever’—this part is really ominous. It means if you were really out at a bar with a friend when you could have just as well have been in the apartment and ready to take her call, when she was going to be towed for God’s sake, if you’re actually that kind of man, then you might as well have been with a woman too. Because nothing about you is respectable or trustworthy at that point.” He shoots the plume of smoke luxuriously toward the glittering bottles lined before the mirrors. “And you want to say, ‘I didn’t have to tell you I was at the bar with a friend—and if I had been at a bar with a woman, honey baby, believe me, I wouldn’t have told you I was at a bar at all.’”
For my part, I can see the moment precisely in my mind’s eye, the scales of justice weighing the two sides of the conversation. I say, “To which she would reply, ‘So you want some kind of credit for telling the truth?’”
“Exactly,” my friend says. “But of course it wasn’t credit you wanted; you wanted her to see the logic behind your telling of the truth, the natural outcome of that narrative. And yeah, you did want slightly to remind her that the truth is just an option: that fact is your final card. Possibly they lie just as much as we do: the difference is that most of the time, unless they’re sleeping with someone, we don’t give a shit what they’ve been doing, spending, seeing, hearing, and being tempted by, when we’re not together. Aren’t we awful?”
“Are you going to report we had a drink tonight?” I ask him.
“Shit no,” he says. On his way to the apartment he’s sharing with his girlfriend, he says, he’ll pick up some mints, and maybe some flowers or a bottle of wine.
“What happens when you tell the truth,” he says, “is that now this incident of you being at the bar, which you sanitized to the point of what you thought would be innocence, just a matter of three beers, some talk, a handshake, a slight buzz, this historic betrayal actually can be called upon at a moment’s notice, for years, long after you’ve forgotten about it and long after you would think it had any moral weight whatsoever, simply to wipe out whatever argument you might be making in favor of yourself and your priorities at the present moment. So guess what—you lie. They teach you to lie.”
I tell him that not all women are like that; that not all women need to take such a strong position on what their man does with his time or with whom.
“Yeah?” he says. “That’s a very interesting theory. That would mean there are some women who don’t really care if you have a job or make any money or occasionally have meaningless ego-boosting affairs either. I just haven’t met any yet.”
Truth be told, some of this man’s relationships have been pretty shallow, and he always arranges his life so he’s in just this sort of trouble, or worse. We all know from therapy that he is the true architect of his psychic circumstances. But he’s lived with this woman for almost two years, and I happen to know that he actually loves her and she actually loves him. I like her, she’s nice, and she’s fundamentally kind. What he’s talking about essentially is that word, power. And the power struggles every relationship goes through, the terrain fought upon is frequently that of moral authority. In each relationship, we invest the most significant parts of our lives—sex, money, loyalty, social desirability, affection, humor, kindness—with precise moral values, and when we’ve come to some fluid agreement about the values assigned to each, we commence adding up. Men know that women almost always are ahead in this valuation; we are, generally speaking, comfortable with the idea. Even back when men were invariably the major earners and were allowed to act like lords of the manor, the women’s suffering gave them a certain moral standing. Thus it was the same in our parents’ marriages most of the time, to the degree that those marriages lasted; and when they didn’t it was even more severe an imbalance in the woman’s favor—as children, many of us knew our fathers were assholes—and so this state of moral disparity seems fairly natural to us. Of course, now most women have jobs; many earn as much or more than their mates; we can’t take on the airs of a couple of generations ago; our valuation in the power equation has fallen significantly, even though on the whole, our behavior has improved. My friend’s point is that, without any special handicap or privileges, in the struggle for moral legitimacy, we have to lie to even stay close.
**********
The social human being lies about all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons. The phenomenon has been widely studied and analyzed, and books on it are published all the time: I look up books on lies and lying in the database at the bookstore, a search limited to books issued over the prior six months: eighteen titles. The definitive philosophical investigation is by Sissela Bok, called, On Lying, in its umpteenth edition. She examines lying for every reason but the main one: maintaining a workable sexually intimate relationship with another human being. What interests me, increasingly, is not the relatively clear-cut world of lies we tell for social purposes or political purposes or to protect ourselves from tyranny or even to fend off shame and retribution; I am most intrigued by the seeming necessity of the mild and constant coloration of the world that men do in order to get along with women, in order to make the world as we understand it palatable and understandable to them.
For instance: say you’re a man, and you run into an old acquaintance on the street and you end up talking and joking around for twenty-five minutes. This throws off a tight schedule of errands and later commitments, so you cut off one errand and shorten up on another and you’re still behind by fifteen minutes, so you make up some reason for it, even though you are not really asked to do so—“You should have seen the line at the produce market!” or “It took them fifteen minutes to find my shirts”—because you’d feel foolish, and you’d probably be chided (hard, should the later commitments be fraught enough with some kind of social tension, or if there are small children that need to change hands) if you simply reported that, guess what, I ran into so-and-so and we ended up talking for twenty-five minutes. So-and-so is relatively insignificant in your life and you won’t see him or think of him again in all likelihood for six months, so why did you waste so much valuable time chatting him up? Wouldn’t five or seven minutes have done just as well, in the economy of fellowship laid out to acquaintances of that kind? And you peel back the outer skin of you own motives and you find that you were in good spirits and so was the acquaintance and you managed to make each other feel slightly more vital and significant in the flow of world events that day. You were given an opportunity to stage a production, outside the bakery-café, and the play was the current version of the story of your life. It actually interests you to do that. On a given day like the one I’ve imagined, I doubt any man, put on the spot, could possibly explain such a minor transaction in the economy of his ego in a way that would make it easily comprehensible to a woman.
Given, of course, that when a woman is waiting for a man to run some errands, there is already established a certain moral platform for her expectations: that he will screw up somehow, that he will get the wrong things or come back late or blow some engagement he has promised to go on with her after he has run his errands, something that she knows, in the depths of her heart, he doesn’t want to do and that he shall try to find some way to get out of, even up to the final moment. She know that what he wants to do is hang around on the couch and read magazines or watch movies and not even speak for the remainder of the day—that’s what he really wants to do , and she doesn’t want that to happen. The maneuvering begins. Or it never ends.
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My wife and I had a dog, years ago, and we gave the dog to my mother-in-law when a time came in which we couldn’t keep it anymore. It was a male dog, a dog whose entire being screamed out “Get me fixed.” We didn’t fix him, though, seemingly out of laziness but really because we liked him the way he was—sweet but totally out of control. My wife especially loved him; he signified everything she actually likes about men—he was relentlessly exuberant and strong, and in his tremendous eagerness to get to the next thing he used to literally pull her over when she was walking him. The crucial point was that she was able to enjoy his compulsive, single-minded, uncooperative (and relentlessly horny) nature because she associated him with none of the disappointed social expectations or emotional pain that she associated with actual male humans, such as me. I envied him, frankly.
And in my mother-in-laws house was a large and extremely comfortable feather-cushioned sofa, which was so positioned that you could see it as you came downstairs from the bedrooms toward the living room, reflected in an ornate entryway mirror below you, around a wall that divided the stairway from the living room. Now, the dog, who was not supposed to lie on the sofa, because he shed and he didn’t always smell that good, didn’t know the sofa could be seen from above and beyond the wall. And my mother-in-law would put folding hors-d’oeuvres tables and other such items on the sofa at night to keep him off it; but during the day, if no one was in the living room, he had free reign. And we used to come down the stairs and watch in that perfectly positioned mirror as the dog, hearing us come, would slide quietly off the soft cushions and get himself swiftly into a resting posture on the floor. By the time we’d get to the bottom of the stairs and turn into the living room, his eyes would be closed and he would be pretending to be asleep. I never knew of another dog that would pretend to be asleep. I just knew how he felt. When in doubt, when trouble’s a-brewin’, when you think you might get caught: lie.
I ask another friend, a successful editor, about lying. I tell him, “I’m not talking about the things everyone lies about because you absolutely must lie about them. I’m talking about the daily stuff, painting the sky all pink and blue.” ‘ All those pretty lies,’ as the Joni Mitchell song puts it. He’s young and recently wed to his longtime girlfriend.
“Oh, man,” he says. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Why not?” I say.
“’Cause I’m not sure I wasn’t to share this stuff with anyone who’s not a full-time psychiatrist,” he says. Then, after a significant pause, he gets to the real point: “And because I’m not sure I want to give up my trade secrets—if I put them out there, the world might become an imbalanced place.”
One of the theories that emerges as I discuss this with other men is that it all begins with Mom. Doesn’t everything? A boy loves his mother, but he reaches a certain age, and he becomes, among other things, sexual—chaotically and overwhelmingly so. His father knows well enough to steer clear of any area where this subject might be touched upon; but his mother doesn’t, so the boy must start lying to her, lying essentially about who he is, because the world he has come to inhabit is simply not translatable into the terms of the relationship he has with her, or into the terms established by her daily expectations, and none of these terms are negotiable as far as he can see.
“I remember the day I began the lie,” an executive friend tells me. “And it really is all the same lie, your whole life long. It was the day the copy of The Godfather moved from the bookshelf to under my bed. That was the day I started lying to my mother. It changed the valences. Remember page twenty-seven, with Sonny at the wedding?”
“I think it was page twenty-eight,” I say.
This same man reveals that whenever he tells his wife about female colleagues, particularly any female he has had lunch with, his wife will eventually inquire about the woman’s age (albeit as subtly as she can). “I always add ten years to the estimate,” he says. “It keeps the conversation clear.”
In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, there is a seemingly gratuitous little misogynistic aside, in which the narrator, Marlow, before leaving for the ugly colonial world of the Belgian Congo, visits his aunt who lives in “the white, sepulchral city” as he calls Brussels. She has gotten him the job that will take him up the Congo River, and she goes on enthusiastically about what is, essentially, the rape of Central Africa for European profit. The aunt believes the hype that this colonization is actually a great and civilizing enterprise. Marlow, who knows better, comments dryly, “It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own…. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset.” At the end of the book, when a very damaged Marlow returns to Europe after having looked into the nightmare world of the ivory trader Kurtz, this earlier scene makes better sense. Kurtz had gone off to Africa full of those same false lofty ideals, but instead of becoming a noble agent of civilization he became a brutal tyrant, and now he is dead. Marlow visits Kurtz’s “Intended,” who remembers Kurtz in the rosy and heroic terms Kurtz and her society taught her. She remembers his magnificent ideas for the civilization of Africa, which he wrote out at length (only later to scrawl across the pages, never seen by her, the rather comprehensive phrase, “Exterminate all the brutes!”). She asks Marlow about Kurtz’s last words. Marlow knows how enormous a gulf exists between what she is capable of taking in and what those words were: “The horror! The horror!” and he knows too that he can never describe for her the kinds of horror those words refer to. So he tells her Kurtz’s last words were her name. “It seemed to me,” he says after the lie, “That the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.”
******************
When men cease to be boys, when we pass for the first time beyond the moral circle of our mothers’ kingdoms into new worlds of our own making, into what we soon think of as the “real” world, we commence a psychological journey similar to Marlow’s: We look into the darkness of our own developing willfulness, our sexuality, our ambition and our ego. In order to succeed as men, in the terms our particular civilization has established, we have to build these things up and constantly strengthen them. This task feels (and always will feel) in some essential way like a criminal activity, one that we should undertake largely in secret, kept from our families for fear that we will be identified as alien and repulsive when once we’d been beloved, and, to a lesser degree, from our friends for fear of being too sharply cut down to size in what turns out to be a highly competitive mission.
Women wonder, often out loud, about the male ego, about its outlandish size and its callous assumptions. Well, here’s an announcement that I’ll deny in the morning: It’s even worse than you think; that’s why we try to hide a lot of it from you. And here’s something else, which I’ll deny even before the morning: when you discover a man has lied to you about something, what he then “admits” to you as the truth will—at least in a few crucial respects—also be a lie. The full truth, the whole thing, almost never feels like a viable option.
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