Why Are People Offended by Honesty?

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I don't mean telling someone "My God, you are fat!" or anything like that. But just being open and honest about situations.

For example, I teach this very sweet 13 yr. old boy private lessons. He told me he wanted to visit America to see my hometown (which is Baltimore). I said "Oh, but Baltimore is dangerous! There are lots of guns there. You might get shot!" I said this with a laugh though.

My mom said this was totally inappropriate. But it's true! Baltimore has an incredible amount of violent crime.

So why is this offensive? I've said similar things to people and they get all up in arms. I don't get it...

Honesty forces a realignment of preconceived ideas.

On another note, perhaps what your mom thought was inappropriate is that you were scaring him and shattering his dreams.

That's not honesty. That's ignorant fear, and it is inappropiate.

That's the stuff that's fueled genocide and war for centuries.

That doesn't sound like honesty, it sounds like hyperbole. Gun violence happens between rival gangs or in domestic violence situations, but very rarely with random strangers on the street. Have you ever heard of a single case of a tourist in Baltimore being shot? It sounds like what you said was jokey, not an attempt at honesty.

It was inappropriate because he is 13 years old, your argument was hyperbolic, and he was showing an interest in you and your background (not Baltimore) and you essentially shot him down.

i think you were perfectly in the right, but i don't really understand humans.
it's like how they get upset if you are unable to feign respect for something ridiculous they believe!! !

Woops! No problemo, we all say the wrong things at times, or at least not-so-appropriate things. I've accidentally said something racist in public before, by not using the right term .

I agree with both the OP and the comments: it was hyperbolic and sent a negative message to a young mind. But the broader question of why honesty offends is important.

How many people here have been caught in the dating trap of "I would like to be friends" meaning "please never talk to me again"? It's a hard learned lesson for me, as someone who loves people and wants to make friends (but is pretty bad at it). When someone tells me that I am excited, yes, of course I want to be friends. If I like you enough to date you then I certainly like you enough to be friends with you. But such statements are false, intended to be a polite rejection.

For me the trouble is when people ask me something, I answer honestly. That applies to everything from 'how are you?' to 'how would you change the world?' to 'do I look good in this dress?' I take questions very literally and feel that if you don't want the answer, you shouldn't ask the question. As a result in conversation I don't ask questions I don't want the answer to, and when I ask someone how they are, I want them to be truthful with me, not giving me the dismissive 'fine'. The net result of this is that I detest smalltalk, which is nothing more than a series of meaningless questions and comments with irrelevant or inaccurate responses and replies.

I have gotten told I was mean for telling someone something because I didn't leave them with their wishful thinking or happy thinking and I had to break it with the truth. But it be unintentional what I did. One example was when I was talking to my first ex and I told him how I have showed my online friends his myspace profile so they see what he looks like and he told me he thought it was women checking his page out and now he is disappointed it's been my friends. My husband said this was mean and I asked him why and he said I should have left him with his fantasy. To me that is deceitful.

I remember trying to dig to the lava when I was eight because I learned in school what was under the earth crust and my mom didn't even tell me I will never make it to the lava. I bet the reason why she didn't tell me is because she didn't want to disappoint me. I wish she would have told me so I wouldn't have wasted my time. I gave up eventually because the ground got too hard to keep digging and the hole got too deep. But hey I still had fun digging so maybe that was what she wanted for me. It took me till my late teens to realize I am sure she didn't want to disappoint me so that was why she didn't tell me. I guess deceiving people isn't always bad.

The OP reminded me of my last ex when he would tell me how I would get raped in the streets if I go out by myself because downtown is unsafe or how I might get mugged on the bus or how men might hurt me because of my "naivety" and because they are "NTs and can read it." He was basing this on what he heard in the news I think and also the fact he was a paranoid person. I don't think he was doing it to be mean and my parents thought he was. I've told them he was just paranoid. And I proved him wrong by doing all those things after we had split up and none of those things happened to me. He told me lot of negative things because he was a negative person.

There is a difference between honestly and dimplomacy. We would do well to try to always understand the dimplomacy thing. I mean why not tell someone they are fat otherwise?

BTW: I lived in Baltimore area and there are plenty of areas that are not danagerous and are (in fact) quite nice.