Why Men Lie

I recently wrote a post about cheating. I said that my future partner would never cheat on me because our relationship was going to be based on honesty.

Blah, blah, blah.

Super cheesy. But that was just the beginning of my thoughts on the topic.

It’s not that my future partner isn’t going to cheat on me. It’s that that the idea of cheating will be an anachronism in the future because our relationships, at their core, will be about telling–and living–our truth.

Anachronism: something or someone that is not in its correct historical chronological time, especially a thing or person that belongs to an earlier time. The sword is an anachronism in modern warfare.

The sword is to modern warfare what cheating will be to modern relationships.

Old. Outdated. Out of touch.

Let’s unpack the context of cheating.

Cheating only occurs because we don’t believe we can get what we want–e.g., sex, love, happiness, intimacy, etc.–through honesty. 

The key word is believe.

Honesty/Dishonesty:

Most men are pretty bad at the honest approach. We try, but ya’all don’t make it easy for us. Especially when telling the truth may cause WWIII.

When we don’t speak our whole truth, it’s because we think:

a) we’ll be shot down

b) you’ll flip out

c) it might end our relationship

We’re afraid of the backlash, so we lie instead.

Men don’t know how to have difficult conversations (i.e., emotional) with our partners. And, as trite as it sounds, we don’t want to hurt you.

Let’s start with the first part: we don’t know how to have difficult conversations.

What you have to understand is that we’re not used to your directness. There is no machine to train that muscle at the gym. So, when you bring something up that has to do with our emotions, we go into deer-in-headlights (aka holy shit) mode.

Quite literally, we are stunned. The words pouring forth from our reptilian brains have one and only one objective: to stop your line of questioning–immediately.

Remember the fight or flight instinct?

We attempt to flee the conversation. But if you are cunning or clever, you keep picking at our defenses, trying to get us to share more deeply or to explain ourselves.

Luckily (or not), we have a keen ability to keep a cool demeanor on the outside while being terrified-as-fuck on the inside.

Many of you then make the million-dollar mistake.

You take our calm demeanor to mean that our words are congruent with how we’re actually feeling and thinking. 

The truth is, often, we’re not even aware of how we’re feeling.

Take some time to digest that.

Now for the second part: we don’t want to hurt you.

Many of you rolled your eyes at this one. I call bullshit, I hear you saying. I totally get it. Definitely smells of some serious poo.

But there’s truth here. Not just for me, but for a lot of men. We hate to see someone we care about hurting. Women are so much more in touch with their feelings, which obviously makes you all more sensitive, too.

Men learn to relate to our own feelings through relating with the feminine–i.e., through our relationships with women. Watching you cry makes us feel funny inside. It’s a mixture of helplessness, adoration and admiration. We admire this strange super-power you have. (Kinda like penis-envy, but for a man.)

Being in contact with a being who is close to her feelings helps us to recover ourselves; our whole selves. Depth Psychologist, Carl Jung, talks about this being anima/animus work.

For us, emotions are a bizarre thing. We are simultaneously baffled and terrified by them. This is really important for women to understand when it comes to men. The world you swim in–emotions–is completely foreign to us.

We’re emotionally retarded.

Literally.

Sure, you may cry your eyes out if we admit that we want to jump someone else’s bones. But you’ll be ok. You’ll survive. But we don’t always get that. We don’t know how to share our truth without scaring or hurting you.

So, we don’t.

Are you starting to see it now? to feel it? We don’t want to hurt you, but we also don’t know how to talk to you; so we hide, pretend, lie and even cheat.

Quite a conundrum.

Often, when something feels off, many women attempt to address it. However, we will deny your query–INSTINCTIVELY. (We don’t even intend to lie. It’s seriously instinct.)

Survival instinct.

Other times, women want love so badly that they’re willing to ignore their own internal guidance system to keep their relationship intact. You know deep down that something isn’t right. But you stuff that knowing and try to go about life like everything is fine.

When you get the courage to finally bring it up, many of you let us talk you out of it by convincing you that you’re blowing things out of proportion or–our ace under our sleeve–that you’re crazy.

The dirty little secret, though, is that women play their own part in this fiasco: by not trusting themselves.

And in so doing, you are letting men down by not holding up to your collective part of the deal. The spiritual deal. The unwritten contract that you made when you came into this world as a human being. If you’re with someone, you’ve agreed–on a soul level–to be the emotional rock for your partner to grow.

I know society tells us it’s the other way around, but that’s a big lie. I remember distinctly from my last relationship thinking that I was her emotional rock. But it was all bullshit. I was terrified to enter into that emotional territory. Being her rock was my safe place.

It helped me avoid having to sully myself in the messiness of my own emotions. Women are emotional, in an indirectly proportional way, to how disconnected a man is from his emotions. The more unrelated a man is, the more emotional a woman becomes, in order to compensate.

But here’s the thing: you don’t want a man to be your emotional rock as a way of hiding from his own emotions.

You want that from someone who is able to go to that place with you-not a scared, emotionally-inept man.

And, by the way, I’m not putting men down by saying that, either. We have little to no experience with our emotions. It’s only through our encounters with the feminine that we learn to navigate emotionality; otherwise, we never do.

So don’t judge us for our emotional ineptitude. It may be the water you swim in.

But it’s the water we drown in.

 

 

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