About White Lies

I’ve never believed that relationships work on total transparency and this is carved from empirical evidences, both narrated and lived experiences.

You see, white lies were created for a valid reason and sovereignty to use it – or abuse it – lies in all of us, of course more so for people who are in relationships, because you need to lie more often than the rest of us.

By definition, for the benefit of those vocabulary challenged,

White Lie [noun:]
[Def:]

1. An often trivial, diplomatic or well-intentioned lie
2. What people say to avoid un-necessary confrontations, usually in the form of nagging
3. Used by people to explain periodic disappearances
4. Used by people when they say, ‘You look fine’.

In the old days when my heart – and penis – belonged solely to one woman, I was a religious subscriber to white lies. This was because that person was highly possessive and restrictive. Her repertoire of laws included, no gambling, no clubbing and no watching shows with excessive violence, which effectively boiled down to WWE, even despite my argument that it was essentially a soap opera with well choreographed acts of violence.

She was like Hitler, passionate, domineering, believed in dictatorship, just that she didn’t have testicle issues, a penis or a moustache for that matter.

I would often lie about going to the clubs just so that I could sneak out for a game or maybe 5 of mahjong. Just imagine, I had to LIE that I was going clubbing just so I could play mahjong, which in her rank of trinity of evils, sat right at the top, above even an intemperance of alcohol and a lewd affair with the toilet bowl after.

That was a white lie, even though she would nag about it, but she genuinely preferred me at the clubs drinking then throwing money over the table for mahjong. It was a strange affixation she had, tying the decay of a soul to gambling. Yes, I believed she saw moral fibre as paramount to liver failure.

And even when I was at the clubs, obligations, responsibility and a blind commitment to love were my sheath for any misdemeanor. If I did flirt, it would merely be restricted to eye contact. There were no exchanges in contact numbers or bodily fluids, and I my purpose there were solely for obligations to friends and abuse of whiskey.

That was until one night that I got hit on by a girl and I actually recounted the story back to the Empress Dowager – even though I didn’t take her contact. She got worked up and started questioning if there were more incidents that I didn’t tell her about.

I told her there was one time Coco Lee flew in all the way from Taiwan to propose to me on one knee in the middle of Zouk. She didn’t think it was the least bit funny. She stared so hard, she would have made blind people blink. I said, “can’t you take a joke?” and she said,

“Do you think this is funny?”

And when someone says that, you know that NOTHING you say after that is going to resolve it and EVERYTHING you say is going to be wrong. That was when I realized how big an idiot I was for not using what God had created for men; white lies.

Just the other day, I had a short discussion with a friend, because her friend was upset that her boyfriend had gone to a KTV joint and had a lap dance from one of the girls. Now, the thing is, the boyfriend was honest about it and recounted the entire incident to her.

His validation for visiting the joint was based on the cruel participation of a stag’s night and that the lap dance, part peer influence and part submerging to the prevailing mood of a final night with hedonism, was merely a transaction.

The one mistake he made, was the overtly vivid account of the girl's breast being close enough for him to relate the scent to a familiar fruit. Now that pissed the girlfriend off because as much as she acknowledges the sentiments of camaraderie on a stag’s night, she didn’t appreciate the fact that he had to have a lap dance.

When I was asked on my opinion of the matter, I said that what was really important, was the deliberations and intentions behind the lap dance. If it was as he had said, a mere transaction, then he really is dumb enough to believe that honesty and love is beyond the myopic lenses of jealousy and paranoia.

You do not tell this kind of shit to your partner and expect them to be perfectly calm about it.

White lies work like a sort of space time continuum, where we use it to fill in an event that we do not need to convey. This is usually well intended, because the activity that is being covered up is trivial by some records and does not compose of any detrimental effects to the relationship.

This is only for incidences that you did not plan for underlining intentions. For instance, that lap dance ended there and then, or maybe you caved in and nibbled a nipple. But you did not fuck her – or him – and it ended with nothing, or maybe just an erection and not a post coital shiver at the transit hotel.

White lies are only for preventing people from making a huge fuss out of nothing and this is something humans – I won’t even say women because I’ve seen how men can over-react – are vastly proficient at, much like crop-circles and aliens, retrenchments and recessions or planes crashing into buildings and terrorism.

They say ignorance is bliss and sometimes it is. We don’t really need to know every intricate detail or aspect of how our partner’s day went, or at least we shouldn’t. There’s always that line where we should be able to enjoy, even if it means having some harmless fun like a flirtatious conversation that isn’t navigated towards the bedroom or a grind with a stranger at the dance floor, just as long as we know that our limits are tagged to the song.

I see the protest in some of your eyes as you are skimming pass this. Let’s be brutally honest. EVERYONE one has lied and if we all grew sharper noses when we did, rhinoplasty would be obsolete. Somewhere, sometime, somehow, you’ve told a white lie before, because you like all members of humanity understand the intrinsic value it has to sustaining a relationship.

I can understand why that person was upset with her boyfriend; that was because he was a moron not to use a white lie. Despite what people say about the merits of honesty in a relationship, you have to know that honesty is only appreciated intelligibly.

If you are going to be doing things that your partners are not going to be happy with, then insert a white lie. If you have to lie like OJ on the witness stands, then do it, because people only appreciate honesty when it is something they want to hear.

And if you are really good, white lies can be used to explain the following; waking up next to strangers, turning up late on Thursday mornings for work and not calling after sex.

Or if you really must know, if your white lie fell through and they get upset with your honesty, then what you can do, is to throw huge words like, “over-reacting” and “at least I’m being honest” or my personal favourite, “forget it, next time I won’t tell you anything”. These work great with the right tone of agitation, because if you execute it right, you can actually make them feel bad about it.

White lies, it’s all about simple manipulation of the truth.