Lies??

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Hi, new here... I'm an NT partner....

AS folks - can you help me understand what might be going on when my partner says random things that she later says aren't true? I feel that my partner is generally honest and my understanding is that people on the spectrum are more precise with truth than NT's. I tell white lies sometimes and I don't think my sweetie ever does. However, she will make statements about herself and then at a later time tell me that it is absolutely not true, and also be horrified that she said such a thing.

For example "The only sexual chemistry that I think would be greater than ours might be with one of my students because of the taboo, and I hope I would have the strength to resist it"

When I asked her about this a few months later, she had no idea that she had said it, and was totally appalled at the idea that she might have chemistry with her students.

I have dozens of examples like this, on various topics, ranging from mildly to extremely distressing

Any thoughts?

[opinion=mine]

I know that I'm gonna catch Hell from others on this, but I think that if confronting your partner with what she has said before results in her denying that she has ever said it, then you may want to consider breaking off with your partner - she is either a chronic liar or she has problems with her memory.

The former is best treated with distance, while the latter may require treatment under the care of an appropriately-trained mental health professional.

[/opinion]

I don't know...sometimes I play with ideas and I might share them even though they end up not being something I stick with. If something ends up not being relevant to me, I often forget it. This happens fairly often that I will have had a conversation and not really remember having it. I am not one to lie, but apparently I can be one to share an "opinion" that I don't really have because I was thinking about it at one point, and then dropped it as an opinion.

My memory is also weird.

One time my ex asked me if I liked what they did to the house down the street. I asked him what house. He said the one that was on fire a few months before. I said I didn't realize there was a fire. He said I watched the fire trucks. I don't remember it. At all.

Depending upon how unfocused I am, I can go from being incredibly attentive to details in my surroundings that will stick with me forever, to hardly recognizing anything in my surroundings and forgetting about it the next day. It's not dishonesty, but I do think it is an executive functioning issue as I do believe it has to do with working memory.

Let me ask: doe she seem to spend a lot of time daydreaming?

^^^ This made me laugh. A house near us was recently knocked down. I drove past it every day for two months. Then my husband said 'wasn't it sad about that old house being knocked down'. I hadn't even seen it. I can remember whole screeds of useless information. I can rattle off poems word perfectly that I last read 20 years ago. But sometimes I will not remember an entire conversation I had yesterday.

Edit: Kore- it's hard to judge if she is lying to you from this example you gave. To me (with my short term memory issues) it sounds as though she said something, and then maybe her opinion changed and she just forgot the conversation. I can certainly do things like that. I have had whole conversations that I have taken an active part in, and when people repeat them back to me, it sounds plausible, but I just don't remember them
I would hope that you wouldn't dump her just because she has memory issues!

However, from the way you phrase your OP, it sounds as if you have many more concerns. Have you actually caught her lying? About something that you know is a lie, rather than her forgetting something she had said?

The fact that you said many things she has said 'distress' you worries me more. I can't really help more without any other examples to go on, but it sounds to me as if you need to sit down and have a serious talk with her, and find out what is going on.
I hope things work out for you.

Last edited by Moomingirl on 19 Apr 2013, 8:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I always forget stuff I say. Someone repeats something back to me I said to them somewhere down the road and I have no recall of it. There are many times when I've said, "I said that?!".

When I was 18 I moved into the house of an older relative. He started off thinking I was a pathological liar because I switched gears so much.

I think sometimes I say things almost as if I were talking in my sleep and of course don't remember having said it.

I'm usually more attentive to details than my NT husband, but sometimes I'll suddenly see a change (new store, store died, etc) and be all "Look at that!" And he'll say, "Um yeah, we already talked about that weeks ago." Sometimes I'll have a random train of thought and only say one small line of it that turns out to be completely random and bizarre, and forget about it completely. "Really? I said that??" -_-; lol
So it's hard to say if your sweetie is actually lying or just forgetting. Have you ever asked her what her train of thought was to come up with these random sayings?

Thanks for all the thoughts!

I definitely don't think she is deliberately lying.

It does sound more like focus, distraction, what is relevant and maybe memory glitches.

AS folks, do you tend to be less interested in your own experience than in external reality? In other words, do you find it boring to reflect on your own perceptions, thoughts, emotions, behavior, wants and needs?

All of the weird "lies" from my sweetie were things she said about her own wants, needs and desires. Is it hard for people on the spectrum to self-assess wants/needs/desires, apart from particular strong interests?

I seemed to have that same issues in my last relationship but my ex boyfriend may have been manipulative. And I thought for a while I had a bad memory and I always felt like getting tape recorder and use it to record our talks so I could see I did say it or not or that he said it or not. Then I read about manipulation and saw this was one of them and thought maybe he was manipulating me because they will make you second guess yourself and think maybe you really did say that and believe them.


Then my husband will claim I said something or agreed to it and had no memory. I know he wouldn't manipulate me so I believe hm. Then he tells me I was on the computer when he told me and I get mad about it because I feel he took advantage of it. He knows when I get over focused, I have a hard time switching gears to listen to him speak and I don't process it and the information does not stay in my head and I am not really listening when I think I am. It's like amnesia because then I forget about it fast. So to tell me something while I am online or too focused on something know full well I have this difficulty and the to say later I agreed to it as an attempt to make me feel guilty seem cruel and very tricky and manipulative. This could also be the case with your partner. Do you tell he things when she is so focused and her mind may not be all there on the topic you two are on and then it's like amnesia because she forgets about it fast. Doing it unintentionally is one thing but if you are aware of this issue, then I would call it manipulation. I don't even know if my husband can't grasp I have this issue or if he is being a dick. Last time he had me repeat what he said and that helps and I knew then he was not trying to be manipulative or he wouldn't be making sure I understood him and heard him and that I was listening to him.

Lie back. Count the number of lies and have fun. I do the same. People lie to me once. I never tell the truth to them again. Simple.

Or even better - scream Liar liar pants on fire.

Yes, it can have something to do with processing speed. Sometimes, entire stories that aren't true come out of my mouth simply because I don't have time to process the social situation.

As for denial, it's likely she's embarrassed and wants to forget about it; it's unlikely she actually forgets. Even so, I don't think it would be a memory problem, probably more like a processing problem. Maybe try slowing down and try not to pressure her when she's anxious.

No, that sound like the opposite of AS to me.



I think it's hard for us to properly express it to others. Also, I think for myself there's a lot of subconscious stuff that burples to the surface and is sometimes muttered. There are times when I say something crazy to myself out loud. I wouldn't be surprised, if I had a significant other, who overheard one of those subconscious blurbs now and then.

Could one of you be misremembering/misinterpreting what was said?

I remember a couple of years ago a friend brought up something she said that I said that made me sound really bad and I denied it and she insisted I said it and wouldn't drop it right away. I did say something related to that but I think she must have misunderstood or interpreted what I meant all wrong.

Maybe she's just thinking out loud or verbalizing a passing thought. Is she saying it like a conversation or just kind of rambling?

Sometimes I'll find myself just saying random stuff out loud when I'm either by myself or walking around the house doing things and not being noticed by my family. I'll say out of the blue, in a quiet mumble type voice, something like "Oh Lord no, I don't know why I did that" when I'm not referring to anything at all in particular that I'm doing, it's in response to a passing thought of mine. Or sometimes things will just pop out of my mouth without me knowing exactly what they are about. Like earlier tonight when I was in the bathroom putting on my night clothes I said "I will never do that again, I'm never going back there" and I'm not thinking about anything at all that could have anything to do with that sentence, and I make myself think what could I be even thinking of or talking about. Sometimes I have no clue and other times it's something embarrassing or that I feel guilty over or regret from either recent past of 30 years ago and it just pops into my head so I say it.

Also, I've been known to just say things in a somewhat conversational tone while watching tv, to my husband or someone else in the room, simply because I thought of them and they sound like they could be part of a conversation regarding what we are watching. They could be completely made up, embellished, or true. The thing is, I'm not trying to tell anyone something to believe, etc, I've just thought of something that could be small talk so true or not I'll say it. But that's only with family and very close friends who I feel comfortable doing that with. I do it by myself too. She may be doing something like that.

I do not do this when I'm in public or around others who aren't family, etc. I normally look sane lol.

Did you considere the possibility that she was joking? Aspergers can have a very unusual sense of humour and can not show the usual facial signs that NT show when they joke. Perhaps a sentence as "The only sexual chemistry that I think would be greater than ours might be with one of my students because of the taboo, and I hope I would have the strength to resist it" was a joke and you took it seriously. She gave it no importance and, after some months, as it happens with jokes, she didn't remember it.

About all those weird things she said, did you make any complain the moment she said it or you just kept it for months before bringing them to the light?.

In my opinion, if she says something that makes you unconfortable, you should have a talk about it inmediately. Storing it for months is, from my point of view, unfair, because when months after it you bring the subject again, she can not remember under which situation and which with intention she said that.

My mom is also very often like this and in her case I needed a years to understand that it's connected to her ADHD and that she is not lying.

As another poster said, with just one example it's hard to say for sure. What I would speculate is this:

People with AS are known for saying inappropriate things. Also, sometimes if I'm in a situation where there is more than one person talking, I might drift off into my own thoughts. Thoughts can be random, it can be a way of entertaining ourselves (and I don't just mean people with AS, this could be anyone). I have had trains of thought that I have then joined the conversation with and the others have looked at me blankly. I forget that they weren't in my head and didn't know what I was thinking. So perhaps she is having random thoughts, "flights of fancy" as it were, and then voicing them without even perhaps thinking that she's voicing them. They may mean nothing to her because she was just having random thoughts and they were kind of meaningless exploratory thoughts. 'What if's' etc. This would be why she wouldn't necessarily remember them.

Of course, you do realise I am sure, that having AS doesn't mean you cannot have another type of psychological issue alongside that, another disorder. It might be nothing to do with her AS, but something to do with her individual personality or something resulting from another disorder or issue she has.