"Polite" lies/Honesty

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Social lying comes pretty rare to me. It's not the easiest route, especially in the early stages of courtship. It's a bit rough on co-workers, too. Ultimately those who can can accept 'radical honesty' are the people in my life, others steer clear which works for me.

I'm really bad at lying. When I have to lie I know I always get caught out very easily. I never lie to get myself out of trouble or give myself an advantage, not even at school when I was late for class or didn't do my homework. In fact, I hardly ever lie at all. If I don't like someone's hair or something I would just say "umm... I dunno. I preferred the other one but I don't know much about hair."

In the past I have lied online about my personality. I made myself out to be better socially and avoided mentioning some of my obvious quirks and difficulties but now I don't do that anymore.

It's funny cos I can almost always tell when people are lying or making an excuse, whether it's online or in real life and I don't know why I can do this. But it happens so often that I just let them get on with it.

i can lie to protect myself if i practice facial expressions, tone of voice and wording beforehand. i am not so good on the spot. i cannot lie to people i like and sometimes stuff just comes out of my mouth and i can sound quite tactless and say things that are unwise. the fact that facial expressions and tonal inflections are a learned thing benifits me here.

I hate white lies.

For years I was told I had a good singing voice because I enjoyed singing. Finding out that I couldn't sing undermined every compliment I have ever been given. If we are always honest then we make the compliments mean more.

If I have to lie, I have to prepare it in advance. Some really nasty things have happened when I was suprised with a question and told a truth that other people didn't want me to reveal, but never told me not to tell about. I also have trouble with recognising sarcasm or when someone is 'messing' with me. Occasionally I have been accused of lying, in cases when I have made a statement that omitted facts known by a person, but not by me, since I was "supposed" to know these facts without being told.

Being polite is easy for me, since this is a more general situation.

To lie is very hard for me. If it tell a lie, then it eats me from the inside out.
For me to like I have to be thinking of something different that will give the answer that is needed. It is very taxing.

Once I had to take a polygraph to get a job. I used the opportunity to test myself. I found I could give a false answer and pass, but then my mind would think about, and then fail the next question while telling the truth.
The autistic face helps if I can keep emotions down.

Usually when it is to keep out of trouble, such as at work, I will not answer. The only small talk I do is about my interests, and I do not need to lie....

I'm brilliant at lying. However I do not do it much. I will never lie to my friends, no matter what. My conscience is too great for me to hurt my friends in any way. I can lie to people I hate and not feel bad at all, as they don't deserve kindness.

But overall, I will never lie to my friends no matter what. If people don't want to know the truth, don't ask XD

I'm not very good at lying. I got better at it when I worked in a secretarial role for a lawyer who would often ask me to lie when I answered the phone to clients and tried to transfer their call. She'd often tell me to tell them that she was in a meeting or away from her desk, but sometimes she was reading through legal documents and amending them.

At first, it made me feel really uncomfortable about lying to the clients, but then I justified it to myself by rationalising that *I* wasn't lying to them, she was the one who was lying and I was simply relaying her lies, and then I didn't feel so bad.

In high school, I often used to get into trouble about homework. It seems like the social convention when you haven't done your homework is to lie to the teacher about how 'the dog ate my homework' or 'I accidentally put my homework in the washing machine/split coffee on it' etc etc, just make up some lie about why the homework hasn't been submitted.

In my case, my thought process went: Look, I know that they know that pupils are lying, so let's skip the lies and just be honest. So I used to tell them that I simply hadn't done my homework, and luckily, I was in the top classes and achieved good grades, so it's not like my academic record was suffering.

But, apparently, that was worse than lying about pretending to have done the homework and the dog had eaten it. Lying pupils the teachers can deal with, because by pretending that the homework was done but lost/damaged, everyone's colluding with the pretence, no one's rocking the boat. But if you're honest and simply admit that you haven't done it, then you're effectively challenging the teacher's authority. If you lie and pretend you did it, you're still acknowledging the teacher's orders and authority, but you're admitting to having failed to comply, that you've done something wrong. But if you're honest, and tell them to their face that you haven't done it, you're effectively telling them that you don't accept their authority and won't follow their orders, and what are they going to do about it, kind of thing. And they really don't like that.

I still have a bit of a problem with being too blunt and tactless, by not always telling those little white lies.

OK, giving into temptation to bump this.

The two things I'm really comfortable with are telling the truth, and keeping my mouth shut.

I can lie if there is a GOOD moral reason to. For instance, I can lie about someone not breaking a law that I think is really, really unfair, in order to keep the person out of undeserved prison. With a lot of crimes and rule violations, I hate ratting more than I do lying.

"White"/"polite" lies: I'm willing to stretch the truth some on how attractive a woman is, and I think women should be forewarned that if they ask, an honest answer MAY come. Not just from me, but from ANYONE. I try to keep my mouth shut on stuff I'm "supposed" to lie about when possible.

Lies to stay out of trouble: perhaps possible if the trouble would be really, really, REALLY unfair. As in, it would sicken me as much as watching a family member be tortured to see someone else get in similar trouble for a similar "crime." If it's only moderately unfair, though, if put on the spot I will hesitate for a second, then figure they know the answer from the hesitation and tell the truth. If the trouble is fair, most likely I'd have volunteered it already!

An example: I once, fairly recently, on a Spanish essay test, looked at another student's paper to get the professor's name since I didn't know it and was embarrassed about it. I then quickly moved my desk towards the front of the class for fear I would panic and cheat for actual Spanish information. A few days after turning the test in the act ate me up enough for me to confess to the professor, fully expecting a zero on the test. She let me off scot-free! Probably since she had only my confession (which was only to cheating to get her name) to go off of.

Flat-out refusal to answer a question is possible if I think it's something people have a right to conceal.

I will ABSOLUTELY not tell ANY lies that will be clearly detrimental to someone else.

This being said, I don't even come CLOSE to admitting everything that comes to mind, in real life or even on Wrong Planet! I don't want people getting knowledge (especially squicky) that they don't want to have, and my posts would be over 9,000 screens long if I told everything!! Or else I'd go from 300-ish posts total to over 9,000 by year's end.

To that friend bit: I would have to shoot back, "Actually, you can't dictate whether other people think of you as a friend. So, you don't think of me as a friend, but obviously I think of you as one, and you can't do a thing about it!"