Is it okay to lie – sometimes?
A difficult question...I have been contemplating this difficult question for the past week. It all started when I took off on a ten-day business trip. I asked my neighbor to water the roses on my balcony while I was gone and gave him the key to my apartment. This wasn’t the first time that he had looked after my plants and so, without a second thought, I gave him the feeding instructions for my babies, pressed the key into his hand and said goodbye.
Eric is a very special neighbor. He is a musician and composer in his mid sixties. He has recently retired and he has just finished writing a memoir about his sexual adventures as a gay man. We have talked endlessly about love, relationship, family, and naturally, every imaginable aspect of sex with men. He is a lovely guy and a good companion. I must say, it feels awfully nice to have someone in our building that knows me, understands my work and is there for me whenever I am in need. Okay, he is a bit of a hypochondriac and complainer-pest but, hey, nobody’s perfect.
When I returned home after ten days, I discovered that the glass on a very large photograph in my bedroom was broken. I had placed the framed erotic photo on a shelf near my bed. I hadn’t gotten around yet to hanging up the photo so it was just leaning against the wall. I had hung a beautiful black mask over one corner of the photo and massed candles in little red pots just beneath. It formed an attractive installation that I could gaze upon every morning and evening. So how could the glass be cracked? As I mentally backtracked, I realized that there was only one possibility. Eric must have been prowling around in my bedroom. If I had the key to his apartment, I would certainly be snooping around in his closets and drawers as well. Wouldn’t you? I’m speculating that he tried to have a look at the mask hanging on the side of the photo when the frame fell forward and broke. I stood there staring at the broken glass and pictured him nosing around in my underwear drawer and playing with the sex toys in my bedside table. Actually, the image of a gay man dancing around my bedroom in my panties and high-heels seemed hilarious.
In the days that followed, I didn’t know what to do. Of course, I could just take the picture back to the framers, replace the glass and say nothing. But not mentioning it felt weird. I waited a few days and he didn’t say anything at all. I sent him a rather benign text message asking if he knew what happened to the photo in my bedroom and he simply did not reply. He neither denied nor acknowledged any part in the breakage. He just ignored the whole thing. I didn’t ask again because I knew that he would then be forced to lie right to my face. Clearly he feels it a violation of my trust to be snooping around in my bedroom instead of watering my roses like a good neighbor would. So how could he admit his naughty curiosity that ended so badly? What a dilemma!
If he had told me he had been trying on my evening gown and mask when the whole photo collage had crashed to the floor, I would have laughed and forgiven the accident without any further ado. I’m funny that way. I am weirdly fascinated by people’s sexual peccadilloes but detest cowardly lying and cover-ups. I once had a lover who stayed at my apartment for a few days when I was not at home. When I returned, he immediately confessed that he had played with the goddess-shaped dildo that I keep on my altar. “I stuck it in my ass,” he announced matter-of-factly. We both laughed and I never gave it another thought until this week when my neighbor refused to reveal his secret story.
I watch men lie all the time. Women lie too, of course. But there is a special shame that men seem to have around their sexual stuff. They always imagine that women can’t handle the truth, that they will get all emotional and weird and maybe even cry. They get so used to hiding their sexual predilections and infidelities that lying about it just come naturally. Perhaps it’s some kind of unconscious agreement between partners—I’ll do as I please and only tell you what I think you want to hear. It’s often hard to know if telling the truth will work better in the long run or not. Confrontation or harmony—it is not an easy choice.
When I was a teenager and just beginning to have sex, I frequently lied and/or withheld information from my mother about what was going on in my life. It was complicated. And when I was frightened and tried to share with her, I discovered that there were things she did not want to know about, details that she could not bear to hear. I could sense her inability to cope with what I was going through as my sexuality immerged. My desire, my eccentricities, my love of all things erotic appeared to be foreign and overwhelming for her. I felt her fear and so I spared her the confrontation with my “truth.” My withholding eventually killed the intimacy between us but I only fully understood this much later in life when I had a daughter and son of my own and landed on the other side of the parenting equation.
Taking responsibility for our communication feels like an important part of emotional maturity. Telling the truth is not a moral decision for me but rather a choice, a decision to trust others with my secrets, insecurities and vulnerabilities. Sometimes it’s easy but mostly it’s fucking difficult. I can demand it of myself but not of my fellow man. I confess, I am still learning about when to talk and when to hold my tongue, when to lie and when to tell the truth. I have compassion for Eric and his decision to let the accident with the frame slip by without comment or apology. I cannot force him to tell me the story. He is handling it by not handling it. And this is his choice.
I took the picture to the framers this morning and fully intend to give Eric the key again next time I go away. It doesn’t solve my dilemma but I feel oddly at peace with my choice.
P.S. My cleaning lady arrived this afternoon. I haven’t seen her recently because I was traveling so much in the last weeks. “Excuse me Frau Maggie,” she said in her Spanish-accented German. She pulled me by the hand into my bedroom, pointed to where the photo had been standing and said, “I’m so sorry. I broke the glass while cleaning.”
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