On lying, part 7. Truth as intimacy

Guildenstern: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

Player: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured.

-- from Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

I had a thought one night a month or so ago. (That’s how long it has taken me to write this.) I have written a lot here about truth and lying. I have expressed the wish that Wife had been willing to tell me the truth about her affairs -- indeed, about pretty much anything -- over all the long years. I have said that I think Wife does more harm to herself than to anybody else by her lies. And I have even gone so far as to say that none of us can survive without knowing the truth about what is going on around us.

At the same time, I have been trying to reconcile this pretty absolutist notion of the value of truth with the fact that I have not told Wife about my affair with D, and have no intention of doing so. Wife knows that I keep in touch with D, but she doesn't appear to know about the sexual side of the affair, nor that we have seen each other several times besides when D has come out to spend time with the family (Dates 2 and 6) – although in the last week I have come to question this last part. And I have been trying to figure out how I can make sense of this, other than by admitting simply hypocrisy.

There is a practical explanation, of course. While I wouldn't so much mind Wife herself finding out – it would hurt her, but I no longer care a lot about that – I don't want her telling the boys or using it as a tool to pry them away from me. But there has to be more to it than that. To say that something works one way in theory and a totally different way in practice is just to say that your theory isn't sophisticated enough. So what gives?

And then one night I realized that my earlier (extreme) position was wrong. It is simply not true to say that we have to know the truth (by which I mean the whole truth and nothing but the truth) in order to survive. Not quite. Perhaps not even close.

I don't mean we can live in fantasyland. That way, madness lies. But we don't need every last little detail, and often we don't even want it. What we really need to be able to live and function in the world is not The Truth, but a Close-Enough Truth. We need to know enough about reality that we don't step in mud puddles or wander in front of speeding cars. And we need to know enough about other people to be able to treat them appropriately (whatever that is) and to know what to expect back from them.

Have you ever asked somebody "How are you today?" and gotten an inventory of every little ache and pain and petty disappointment that person has endured from sunrise till now? Then you already know what I mean. When we ask "How are you?" we aren't looking for 100% accuracy. Even when the phrase is not a pure formality, what we want is enough that we know how to proceed, no more.

The same principle applies in more serious situations, ones which are not merely social fluff. Once, years ago, I had a woman work for me whose idea of how to explain something was to explain everything. I’d ask her how she was coming along on some project I had given her earlier in the week, and she would tell me every single thing she had done since Monday. I’m sure it was all true, but I could never make heads or tails of it; and in the end I would always have to stop her to rephrase the question. “All I really want to know,” I’d explain, “is whether you are going to be done by Friday. I don’t need more information than that, I can’t follow more information than that, and if you tell me a lot more than that I will get so confused that I’ll never be able to figure out the one part I really want to know. Please make it easy on both of us and don’t bother telling me the rest.” I’m sure she thought I was stupid; to this day she probably thinks I was afflicted with an abnormally stunted attention span. But this is normal. Most information we exchange is filtered to give others just what they need, and often we do the filtering without even thinking about it.

But notice that this filtering depends on where we are and who is talking to us. If your boss asks why you got to work late, it might be enough to say you had to drive your teenager to an appointment; but to your best friend (or on your blog) you might add that the appointment was with the kid’s therapist, or parole officer. Notice also that if you did tell this extra information to your boss, or if you didn’t tell your best friend (or your blog), a person could reasonably wonder why. In other words, while we are (in practice) very rarely called on to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – while the world, in other words, demands from us only a Close-Enough Truth as the essential currency of communication – nonetheless the degree or amount of truth which is expected from us is a function of how close we are to the other person in the conversation. The ability to tell someone the unvarnished truth about your own life is a sign or symptom of a certain level of intimacy between the two of you.

And it is more than just a symptom. Telling a sensitive truth creates an intimacy if there wasn’t one before. In this respect, truth functions on a mental or spiritual level much the way that sex functions on a physical level. Of course, everything has to be just right for it to work out in the best way. You have to be talking to the right person, it has to be the right time, you have to have prepared the ground in the right way ... a lot like sex, in fact. But when everything is in place, can anyone doubt that a well-placed, well-chosen sensitive truth can serve to bring friends closer together? Of course not. We all know this implicitly. It is a basic part of how we live. (Adrienne Rich has an absolutely brilliant essay which touches on this subject, called “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying.” It can be found in her collection On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, and I find myself re-reading it about once a decade ... finding something new in it every time.)

This idea, that there is something fundamentally intimate about the truth, also makes some sense of why we feel a little awkward around people who tell too much of the truth at the wrong times – who talk about their divorces or addictions to people they have just met at dinner parties, or who share the details of their spiritual struggles during PTA meetings. The problem is just a breach of boundaries, making the private public in an unasked and unilateral way. In a sense, we feel exactly the same kind of discomfort we would feel around someone masturbating in public, and for exactly the same reason. There may indeed be philosophical arguments in favor of either public truth or public masturbation (Diogenes was a well-known advocate of both. For the story about his masturbating in public, Wikipedia cites in particular the biography by Diogenes Laertius, Book 6, Cahpter 46.), but the fact is unavoidable that this is not how most of us live.

I have wandered somewhat far afield, but let me come back to discussing my marriage. For a quarter century I insisted – to Wife and to myself – that Wife’s chronic lies were far more damaging than her affairs, and that she should in all events tell me the truth about what she was doing even if it reflected poorly on her. But was I right to ask this? Given what I have said here, given how I now think that I previously misunderstood the real meaning and value of the truth, was my insistence also mistaken? Was I out of line?

Maybe not, but the reasons are different from what I thought they were. I felt then, and still feel today, that she owed it to me and to herself to tell me the truth. And one part of my opinion hasn’t changed – I think she owed it to herself because lying does harm the liar more than it harms the lied-to. But if you had asked me back then why she owed the truth to me, I wouldn’t have been able to say much more than that, ... well gosh, it’s the Truth! What more do you need? And now I would give a more nuanced explanation. I wanted the truth from her, and was disappointed in her for withholding it, for the same reason I would have been disappointed at marrying a woman who refused to fuck me: because at some less-than-conscious level I understood that without the truth we could never be intimate. Without the truth we could never share a life. Without the truth we could never truly be married.

And I really did want that marriage, that intimacy, that life together – Lord, how I wanted it!

Times change.

It is pretty clear to me now, and has been for some months, that the marriage is over – as dead as Jacob Marley, as dead as a doornail – in all spiritual senses of the word. We still have the legal status of husband and wife. We still live in the same house and drive the boys to their various commitments. The medical insurance we get through my work still pays for most of Wife’s medical care. But any hope for a union of hearts and minds is long gone, and I have given up wishing for it. And so I really can’t see that it does any harm, any longer, to lie to Wife about my affair with D. Does it close off the possibility of intimacy? Yes, absolutely. But that was already closed off. Does it build a barrier in the way of any life we could have together? Yes, naturally. But I no longer want a life together with her. And so on.

Is it a good way to live? No it’s not. I hope that at this point it will be only temporary.

Lest I be misunderstood, I don’t think that lovers living a life in truth have to know everything about each other all at once in order to be a couple. Nothing can ever be that absolute in real life, and it is always a process – a Becoming, not a Being. It’s just that living in truth means being open to the process. Rich says much the same thing when she closes her essay as follows:

It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand
everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand,
everything I need to tell you.

It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling
you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me.
That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That I know
we are both trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

The possibility of life between us.