Why We Lie to the People We Love
Before fear turns into betrayal, and how understanding this can help us move on or become better partners.
A quick update before we begin- I’m in the final stages of editing The Stoic Manual: Meditations on the Art of Living, a collection of 150 Stoic meditations on living well. It’ll be released soon and included free for all Annual and Lifetime members.
Welcome! The Stoics were deeply concerned with how we live with other people. Relationships are one of the hardest places to practice love, good judgement, kindness, patience, duty, and self-discipline. That’s why last time we talked about Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person & When Does an Affair Begin?. Today’s essay looks at lying in love, though its deeper concern is the psychology behind it. It asks why we do that, what it costs the people we love, how Stoic philosophy can help us before fear turns into betrayal, and how understanding this can help us move on or become better partners.
Why We Lie to the People We Love
“Do not, however, deem yourself truly happy until you find that you can live before men’s eyes, until your walls protect but do not hide you; although we are apt to believe that these walls surround us, not to enable us to live more safely, but that we may sin more secretly.” - Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 43
“A good conscience welcomes witnesses; a bad conscience, even in solitude, is disturbed and troubled.” - Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 43
“Concealment consists in trying for your own profit to keep others from finding out something that you know, when it is for their interest to know it.”
— Cicero, De Officiis, 3
On a September afternoon in 1860, Charles Dickens carried a heap of letters into the field behind his house at Gad’s Hill and set them on fire. Twenty years of correspondence went into flames. Letters from Thackeray, Tennyson, Carlyle, Wilkie Collins- proof of a life lived at the center of the English literati- burned in an hour. His children watched without knowing what they were seeing. They roasted onions in the ashes and made a small game out of the remains of their father’s hidden life.
Dickens later wrote as though the fire had given him relief. He wished, more or less, that…