Girl on the Net

When I was young, my family used to be big followers of soaps: Neighbours, Eastenders, Coronation Street. I can’t remember what else there was to do on evenings in the nineties besides yell things at the telly as ludicrous fictional characters cocked up their lives in ever more creative ways. Perhaps this is testament to how my Mum raised me, but when I watched soaps, the thing that got me most irate was how terrible people were at just fucking talking to each other. 

On so many occasions one of the people involved in a love triangle, or a long-term dispute, or some other interpersonal drama would build the scene to a climax that involved them saying:

“Listen, Janine, I’ve got something I need to tell you…”

And I’d be on the edge of my seat. YES! FINALLY! The truth will out! Janine will know what’s going on, and be able to assess how she feels about it then either let rip with her anger, dispense forgiveness, or something in between.

Then some prick would knock on the door, ring them on the landline, or burst into the pub with a revelation of their own… whatever. The moment was lost, the conversation moved on, and I’d often find myself yelling at the telly: “just fucking tell them oh my god!”

This was my biggest frustration with soap operas: people never told each other the things they needed to know. They lied, and through lying made every single situation far far worse.

The thing about lies is they often come out. And assuming that they won’t is a huge gamble.

Just fucking tell them

I don’t watch Eastenders any more, but I still see the same problem: in reddit discussions where people are agonising over secrets they might or might not reveal, or advice columns where somebody is discussing a truth that has festered, unmentioned, for decades. And this time, there isn’t even a need for scriptwriters to inject lies in order to build drama: these are real people who are for some reason hiding their true selves from those they claim to love! What the fuck?

I find myself in that same position again. Yelling “JUST FUCKING TELL THEM!” at a screen.

There are, of course, some interpersonal lies that need to be maintained for various people’s safety. I’m thinking here of the frightened teenager who doesn’t want to come out to their bigoted parents as trans, or the partner who’s secretly saving to make their escape from abuse. Some lies provide vital armour to help us battle the world, and these are obviously not the ones I’m talking about here.

I mean the lies that involve someone covering up their own shameful behaviour. An ill-advised one-night stand, maybe, or a pass made at a friend after one too many beers. An amount of money stolen from a joint bank account to cover a debt. You know the kinds of things. The sort of secret that would have the soap opera version of you sitting Janine down at a kitchen table and saying “I’ve got something important to tell you…” just before the phone rings.

Here’s the thing I am urging you to hear: these secrets will not become easier to tell the longer you leave them. They will not get less hurtful for your loved ones to learn once time has passed. They actually get far far worse.

Lies often come out, and assuming they won’t is a huge gamble. What’s more, when you gamble with a lie of this kind, the pain that’s at stake is not yours.

It’s never just one lie

Let’s take an example here. Assume you’ve ‘borrowed’ some money from the joint account to pay off a debt, and you don’t want your partner to know. You’re the one who keeps an eye on the banking app so they won’t know unless they go looking, and you’re working hard to try and replace the money, but it might take a good few months.

Just tell your partner. Now! Right now! Say “I did this thing, and I fucked up, and I’m sorry.” If you tell them now, they might be angry. But they’ll be angry about the debt, and their hurt will be contained to that specific action.

If, instead, you leave it two months and then tell them… they’ll be angry about the debt and also hurt by the fact that you’ve been lying all this time. They might feel lonely and cold in the darkness as they consider why you didn’t tell them sooner, wondering what other secrets you might be hiding beside this one. You didn’t just fuck up financially, you made an active choice to break the trust that they carefully placed in your hands.

If you leave it six months… well. Six months is a long time to spend covering up a lie. Telling your partner ‘don’t worry, I’ve got a handle on our money, you don’t need to look at it.’ The longer you cover up a lie, the more bonus lies you need to tell to shore it up: ‘I can’t find the login at the moment, I’ll see if I can get it later!’. Perhaps not just lies, even, maybe gaslighting too. It’s a short hop, after all, from ‘I’m on top of our finances’ to ‘don’t worry, don’t be silly, you’re being paranoid it’s all OK!’

And if you never tell them but they find out anyway? Then holy fuck. Ouch. Oof. The absolute gutpunch that comes when you uncover a lie told by someone you love is uniquely painful. All the time you’ve spent believing them, trusting them, having faith in them… the sudden realisation that you did all that in vain is (in my opinion) often significantly more devastating than whatever they lied about in the first place. Especially if they’ve been telling bonus lies or gaslighting you into believing you’re being silly for asking: each time they do that they force you to make a choice to reaffirm your trust. Shore it up. Lay aside your legitimate worries and convince yourself you’re being silly, just so you can swallow the poison they’re continuing to feed you.

Ouch. Fucking agony.

When you gamble and tell a lie like this, the pain at stake is not yours, but your loved one’s. That stake rises and rises the longer the lie is maintained, because it is increasingly hurtful to learn that someone you love has deceived you for a significant period of time. Again, I’m not talking here about necessary lies (“Of course I’m straight!” to your aggressive, homophobic parents) or even little white ones (“Yes, you’re great at karaoke!” to your friend who loves to sing). I mean the tawdry, selfish lies that you tell just to save your own skin. To hide the bad things you’ve done from the people who love you – people, by the way, who might appreciate the opportunity to listen and understand and maybe even forgive. The lies that would have you, in the nineties, yelling “Just fucking TELL Janine what you did!” at the telly.

You can’t build love on lies

It’s not merely that the hurt from your lie will grow the longer it remains unsaid, it’s that all the love you built will collapse when it’s outed as well. The connection you’re maintaining with the person you’re lying to right now is constructed on shifting sand. Everything you pour into that relationship – whether romantic or friendly or collegial or whatever – is so much wasted bullshit. The love, care, friendship, compassion, understanding, affection and respect that person might feel for you… it’s all based on a lie! A false belief about who you are. If you are lying to your loved ones, then the love they give you back is just as fake as you are.

That love is not real.

Harsh, I know, but I believe this very strongly. As I say, maybe it’s how I was raised. My Mum was always a big advocate of just owning up to something and saving yourself from getting into more trouble. I’ve done some crappy things in my life, and my relationships, but I can’t remember ever keeping a shameful secret from a partner for more than about a week. Whether it’s snogging a friend or smoking a cigarette, having an ill-advised threesome or spilling coffee on their favourite hoodie, the lie plays out over and over on the TV screen in my brain, at which a miniature version of me is yelling “JUST FUCKING TELL THEM, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!”

And you know what? Telling them is rarely as bad as you think. The truth is hard, for sure, and it sucks to be in trouble. But by telling someone the bad thing you’ve done, you save them from the horror of uncovering it themselves.

More importantly – of absolute paramount importance – you are giving your loved one the choice to walk away if they decide that your behaviour has crossed a line. So you know, if they choose to stay, that the relationship you’ve built together is a truly loving one: rooted in consent. If you give them the chance to either forgive your mistakes or say goodbye completely, you can be confident that, if they do decide to stay, it’s because they genuinely want to be there. If you maintain a lie, on the other hand, your relationship can never truly be consensual.

Everything’s more scary in the darkness

Finding out that someone you love has been lying about something significant is not just emotionally painful, it’s utterly destabilising. It smashes the foundations of the love you’ve built for them, and everything that’s happened since the lie was first told now suddenly comes into question. Did they really mean to say this, or was that an attempt to cover up? Did they actually say that or am I misremembering? Are there more lies hidden deep in these foundations? Better rip them all up to find out the truth!

Learning a shocking truth about someone you love doesn’t just hurt because of whatever that truth was: it hurts because now every single other possible truth is called into question. Suddenly, where you believed there was honesty and light, your whole life is plunged into darkness.

And everything’s more scary in the darkness.

Every noise sounds like a burglar, every movement feels like it could be an attack. Each and every truth you thought was real now seems like a prank played on you by people you thought were loving but who turned out to be malicious and deceptive.

Everything’s more scary in the darkness: even love. Suddenly, in the darkness that lies plunge us into, the people we love no longer seem safe to be around. They are enemy combatants in a war we did not know we were fighting. Where before we’d have asked questions and trusted the answers, now we must enter every conversation armed: if they say this, how can I prove it? If they say that, how will I know they’re in earnest? We are co-opted into the role of interrogator, poking around in the dark, never sure what might count as truth. Screaming at the screen “JUST TELL ME”, but now with the humiliating knowledge that no matter what they say, we probably won’t be able to believe the answer.

Just tell them

I try not to write universal advice, and this definitely isn’t that. I can’t know the impact of your lie or the reason you’re keeping it quiet, so I don’t want to tell everyone who reads this to immediately come clean on everything without any thought for the consequences.

But I do think there will be readers who know exactly the kind of lie I mean. They’re carrying one in their heart: a lie they told through selfishness or a spineless desire to not get into trouble. They’ve behaved in a way they aren’t proud of, and lied to someone they care about to cover it up. And ever since they did that, they’ve felt the pulsing guilt of it. Maybe they’ve told extra lies, to shore up the epic original. Perhaps they’ve indulged in some gaslighting, too.

“Oh don’t be silly, I’d NEVER do/think/say that, you’re being paranoid, come here I love you I love you.”

People who think that eventually their secret might come out, who know in their hearts that they’re gambling with emotions that aren’t theirs to risk. The stake is someone else’s pain, and it rises every day the lie remains untold.

You people? Hear me scream this at you, like a telly in the nineties: just tell them! Pick a time and place when they are calm and ready to focus, do your best to break it gently, and be ready with apologies and a plan for change to show you’re committed to not making this mistake again but… tell them. Just please fucking tell them.

Whatever you have been lying to your loved one about, it will be so much more painful – infinitely so – if they find it out on their own. That desolate, cold, horrifying hurt that you did a bad thing will be compounded exponentially by the knowledge that you lied. And the longer you lie the more it will hurt. For this whole time – be it days or weeks or months or fucking YEARS – you have not been the person they had faith in but a cold, unfamiliar stranger.

The relationship you have with them… has not been rooted in consent.

The love you have built since the start of the lie… is not real.

As I say, I can’t know the impact of your lie. I know it’s hard to come clean on a shameful secret, and it sucks to be in trouble. But it sucks far more if you try to build love on lies – feeding poison and dishonesty to those who have made themselves vulnerable for you.

If you consistently lie to the people you love, the love you believe they give you in return is not authentic. Real love is a two-way street of openness and acceptance. Trust and understanding. It is not sneaky or self-serving. It doesn’t gaslight or deflect or cover up.

I encourage you to live your lives with as much honesty as you can, especially when it comes to those who place their utmost trust in you.

Everything’s more scary in the darkness. For fuck’s sake just turn on the light.