Attitudes about lying

From a reader:

I've just recently found your blog, and I love it. I basically skimmed through your whole blog over the weekend, so maybe you did address this and I missed it, but just in case you haven't, I thought I'd ask:

Was there ever a particular moment/epiphany where you realized that people genuinely struggle to lie - either just as a skill set, or morally they can't abide by lying?

I was never able to take fictional characters who struggled to lie seriously, and merely assumed they were yet another dumbed-down archetype meant to instill a moral objective in children, one of many that society ultimately fails at. Why should I take the grown-ups seriously about not lying when they also, in the process of telling me to "be nice", encouraged me to lie (either outright or by omission)? I struggled to understand the subtle social cues, and took them as invisible nuances of walking and talking that I worked hard to understand - and I assumed lying was apart of these 'unspoken universal actions'.

When I responded to people's various dilemmas over the years with "why don't/didn't you just like?", I never understood them when they said, "I can't!" Didn't they see how pointless this moral attitude was? It wasn't until my early teens when someone explicitly said that they froze up in that situation, and that the lies I'd thought of on the spot they were only able to conceive after careful consideration, that I realized lying was less of a universal and more of a skill-set. After all, if I knew there were people out there who could, say, do a complex math problem easily in their heads that I struggled to do with pen and paper, then of course it made sense that lies I could easily think of would come harder to some people.

Even then, it didn't really occur to me that people could feel such moral aversion to lying. I could understand disliking lying, and I could understand not being good at it. But then a very recent incident sharply reminded me how easily other people become guilt-ridden over the most ridiculous things:

A female friend of mine comes from an extremely micromanaging and conservative family. She wanted to visit a sex shop with the rest of our social group, and we suggested she tell her family that she is seeing "The Hobbit" to justify being away from home and not answering her phone for several hours straight. Simple, right? Except a day later I got a text from her asking if we can see another movie instead. I was very confused and assumed she just wanted a different time frame (preferring a 2-hour block instead of the 3-hour block to be gained with The Hobbit), and after a couple of back-and-forths it turned out now she actually wanted to take us to see a movie "so the guilt and shame would not kill her".

Considering she upheld a very active social life that often has somewhat sexual components to it without her family's knowledge, I was genuinely shocked that she had this aversion to lying. Lying about whether someone is a friend or sexual acquaintance is okay, lying about which part of the city you are in is okay, and lying about what you are doing those long hours you are supposed to be studying in college is okay, but you draw the line at lying about a movie? I'm...actually still rather confused by it. Both by the fact she, specifically, has such an aversion - and that someone can feel guilt about lying when they are doing so as a measure of self-support in the face of unnecessary social suppression. I intellectually understand that some people feel guilt when lying. But I cannot understand why someone who was lying to an overtly-controlling family just to be able to go out with some friends would feel guilty about it. The only explanation that makes sense is that it's a domestic analogue to Stockholm Syndrome - except that she obviously isn't kidnapped nor abused by her family (there was an abusive father, but he has been gone for years, now).

I'm muddling through it on my own and after poking around some of her issues I started to understand it, but now that I've stumbled across your blog, I have to ask - when did you learn people struggled with lying, or did you always know without any particular epiphany? Did you never differentiate between people who struggled with lying purely as a skillset vs those who struggled with it "morally"/emotionally? Did you ever try to explain to yourself why they struggled? If so, what are some of the explanations you've come up with? And if not, how did you handle people's bizarre attitudes towards lying?

M.E.: I don’t think I ever wondered about people’s ability to lie, but I definitely remember trying to coach my long distance cousin about how to stand up to the bullies in his life and being shocked that he wasn’t able to naturally intuit ways of subtly undermining others while maintaining a veil of innocence to onlookers. 

I myself don’t think about or understand lying much. Should we publish what you wrote to see what others have to say?

Reader:

Sometimes, I still have trouble grasping how difficult it is for other people to lie. It's like saying you don't know how to brush your teeth or something. Several years into college and I still have to remind myself that just because I can immediately figure out what someone else's insecurities and psychological weaknesses are, doesn't mean everyone else can. (And it really takes some reminding, sometimes, because it just seems so obvious to me.)

And definitely, go ahead and publish it (and hell, this e-mail, too). I'm curious to see what other people would say. I've had some...interesting reactions to explaining to people (every day people in real life) that I had to 'learn' in my tweens that lying didn't come easy to most people, because I'd been doing it so naturally and easily all my life.