Aspies and pathological honesty

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With me its i always tell the truth of things that are certain such as what I did in a situation but if someone asks a question like "do you keep your room tidy?" i always reply as "I'm cleaning it atm" :p as if its the worst crime in history.

Yep. People want to hear things that fit into what they already believe. A lot of people will lie to themselves so easily, I don't even have to bother telling them a lie. I just let them think what they want.

I got accused of lying lots of times for the same reason by my ex, too... I never was.

If anyone accused me of lying it would be hard to suppress the urge to beat them to death. No joke. It's weird, I get narcissistic rage but my autistic consciousness is above it so it's just about controllable.

Yes there's an important difference between active lying and just not volunteering information. The latter is surely no crime if the speaker genuinely has no inkling that the listener needs to know......an example of it being wrong would be if an attached guy went out with somebody else and didn't tell his partner, unless he's extremely absent-minded......so if his partner asked what he did last night and he said "oh, nothing much," when he'd had an interesting encounter with another woman, even if he hadn't slept with her then it would still be deliberate deception. Sometimes people innocently fail to tell what they should, e.g. they may have had opposite-sex friends who they've no intention of getting sexually involved with, and they might just not realise that although for them it's safe, their partner might not know that and would feel suspicious that they were playing down the significance of such things in order to keep the way open for an affair. They might well accuse the partner of committing a sin of omission, but sometimes it just happens because the partner doesn't know.




I think that's a logical explanation, though strangely enough, when my partners have talked s**t about their exes, I've generally felt good about it, because it reassures me that they're unlikely to feel tempted to go back to them, especially when their exes have turned out to have failed to do stuff for them that I'm doing successfully. But my partners have sometimes got upset with me for telling them a lot of anecdotes about the mistakes my exes made........I guess they felt that I was still emotionally involved with them, which is probably correct for some people, because anger towards an ex is an indication of closeness....but in my case I just get haunted by some of the times when partners have hurt me but denied any aggression, and I often feel the need to try to air my experiences in the hope of getting closure....really I just want to be told "it's OK, I can see how that would have put most people off, and I don't believe you just left her because of your own irrational insecurities." Also with a new partner, I might tell stuff about exes that I hated in the hope of showing them the kind of things I don't want them to do to me, or the kind of care I'm looking for in a partner. Mostly it's the good memories of exes that trouble me.....sure, it shows that they're likely to remember the good if we ever split up, and probably won't just slag me off to the whole town, but anything they tell me about their past that would be a threat or hurtful if it were happening now, feels as if it were happening now, and unnecessary details just make it harder for me to screen out the "adulterous" images.....really I only survive knowing that a partner has had any sexual past at all if I can keep detailed thoughts about it out of my head. So if the details are negative (for the past relationship), I feel better because it gives me an image of them moving apart, which is of course the way I'd want it if the ex was still hanging about.




I don't know what's normal for male sensitivity. I know that I'm a lot more sensitive than I would ever have cared to admit, even to myself, though these days I understand myself better and I can talk about my insecurities pretty openly as long as I'm listened to with respect and don't get told to get a grip. When I have opened up, I've been surprised to find that they usually know where I'm coming from, and at how closely my "insecure" needs match up to the norm. Mostly I've been rather foolishly following the old bohemian/hippie ethos that didn't recognise that opposite-sex friends usually have to be dealt with very carefully when there's a relationship, with safeguards such as a presumption that they will be a friend of the couple and will take a definite back seat.

Sometimes people have had awful things happen to them in past relationships that make them much more afraid of it happening again, so if anybody seems too sensitive, I try to look at their past, to see if that explains anything. I think it's harder for Aspies to reassure people out of irrational insecurities, because MTs probably lie a lot - "she meant nothing to me" - I'd never expect to be believed if I said that, because everybody knows that people don't have relationships with people who mean nothing to them. The danger for us is that we might try to explain exactly how we used to feel about them, with the good as well as the bad, and we might go into data-dump mode without realising that a lot of it will put bad images into their heads.

I don't know if your current partner is truly less sensitive or not. I've faked resilience very convincingly in my time, although I was being hurt, and I've known other guys seem very strong in the face of stuff like "A man was dancing with me and he really fancied me, I might see him again...." but I've found out later that those guys were feeling very hurt. I've also switched off when I've noticed a partner drifting into scary words........with game players who do it deliberately, I've sometimes been able to just ignore it, so undercutting the ploy, and the problem has often gone away without my having to give them to payoff of showing my alarm and showing urgency about their behaviour....attention. And when its just their Aspie mind-blindness that's caused it, I've sometimes been able to screen it out, and just said something like "that makes me think of you humping him, and I don't want to go there," - it doesn't stop me feeling a bit jealous, and I feel hurt that they could go and bother me like that, and I might issue a mild rebuke, but I haven't gone berserk, I've soon calmed down and pretty much forgotten the problem......it helps when I try to think of other things so I forget.....if I remember too clearly what they've said, it can bog me down in resentment and anxiety for a long time.