Aspies and pathological honesty

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I know Aspies usually hate deception and lies while NTs seem to have rather less of a problem with it. Whan I'm wondering here is, when Aspies are less that 100% honest, what form does that dishonesty typically take? What's the biggest whopper you've ever told? How did you feel about it? Do you sometimes get economical with the truth and fail to tell people things they should probably know, even though you are aware of your responsibility? Do you only deceive people you see as enemies (which could include very close people that you would normally declare to be your best friends if you feel under attack from them), or have there been plenty of times when you've soft-soaped your friends?

I guess for practical purposes I'm defining dishonesty as either

1} actively giving somebody an impression you know to be false when you know that they really ought to know the truth.

2) knowing somebody believes something false but not trying to put them right even though you know you could help them by telling them the truth - particularly if you yourself have caused the problem, however inadvertently.

Of course it's very subjective trying to work out whether a person really needs the truth or not. In extreme cases it's obvious (e.g. totally hiding an affair or a drug problem), but many times it's questionable whether fessing up is appropriate.

In my case, my main problems have been with relationships, but I'm interested in replies about any kind of dishonesty.......I don't mean to turn the thread into a discussion of my relationship problems, though any helpful comments about that are welcome as long as they're brief. I've gone into a lot of detail below, so please don't feel obliged to read it all if you just want to post a quick reply to the overall question.

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I've committed sins of omission but I always saw mitigating circumstances. Probably the worst thing I've done in the last few years was when my wife left me without ending the relationship or having affairs, and I found myself committing emotional infidelity (getting too close to other women but niot letting it get sexual) without telling my estranged wife about it. I justified it by telling myself that the desertion had forced me into it and that my wife wouldn't have been able to cope with the information, and might have been scared into coming back to me, which I felt would have been the wrong reason to return. Putting her in my shoes, I typically get so upset and angry if anybody is emotionally unfaithful to me that I can become quite blind to anything I may have done to provoke the infidelity, so such an admission would probably only drive me further away.....my pride would be too wounded, my anxiety would be too intense.......and I also felt that to reveal my behaviour would be inseperable from a power move........stripped of politeness, all we have left is "get back here or I'll have an affair." I also justified my emotional infidelity by remembering that my wife had once said that she felt entitled to male friends, and so I took it as fair for me to have female friends. Unfortunately, it seems that it's rather dangerous to have opposite-sex friends of any great emotional importance if your relationship is going through a rough patch, but in many ways we were already in a rough patch when she said that about male friends, and neither of us was really giving each other the emotional nurturance we both needed.

Deepdown I saw her as an enemy in some ways, because of the problems she brought me and the bad vibes we used to get. So I guess deception to me is rather like owning a machine gun......it's a terrrible weapon but if I'm attacked hard enough and can't see any other way to defend myself, I'll use it, even though I hate war and feel I'm defiling myself to get involved with it.

With partners who haven't hurt me a lot (typically new ones), I've sometimes not told them everything about other female friends, and I suspect my reason is because I'm putting my own emotional safety first. My experience is that when I do talk openly about other women who are in any way close to me, a new (potential) partner generally won't come clean and say "I don't feel comfortable about her," but will start to talk about other men in her life, often making them seem more dangerous than anything Ive been doing, and come over as begging the question, as if she doesn't know anything about emotioal infidelity, and then I'm under pressue to put my foot down. So I've sometimes tried to come over as squeaky clean myself, to try to avoid that response, and to give myself the moral high ground in case I do get forced into saying that the guy has to go........yet if I really do let go of all my female friends, I'm vulnerable, because once cut off from outside reassurance of my ability to find a partner, then any male threat to my relationship is more scary, because that relationship feels like the only one I'll ever find, and the more scared I am, the worse I react.

Luckily I seem to be learning from all this, and these days I seem a lot more capable of owning my anxieties and revealing my female friends........and interestingly, not long back I had to talk with a lady who liked me but was unsure if I was right for her, and regardless of the off-putting effect, I told her all about my ex still hanging around, even though I knew that made me look like a bad risk.....the lady was indeed put off, though as bloody usual she didn't ask any questions or explain how she felt about it.......she didn't tell me why she'd jumped back from me until much later. Integrity won the day.

I've heard that the NT mating game is full of deception - fancying somebody but not saying so, competing against rivals in whatever sneaky ways seem to work best, tweaking jealousy to galvanise the desired person into showing a bit of mettle. So maybe it's not surprising that most of my dishonesty problems come from mating......how can anybody join into that if they're pathologically honest? I rather think that if everybody I'd known had been straight from the word go, everything would have been fine.

I'd also lie to anybody in a position of power over me, if I thought it was my best option. My first reaction is to try the truth, but it's so often like pearls before swine, in fact it's worse, because they take my honesty and use it to stitch me up.

Hello. 30 female, undiagnosed. I am also very honest. Painfully so as I like to say. In relationships and friendships I feel a need to tell them about my past. Especially in relationships. I who I've slept with, the unacceptable things I have done. They have all said " why would you tell someone that". My answer is always "because I feel like its lying if I don't". Which it is. Its wrong to keep secrets. I just have a habit of going into details that most people can't handle. So I stay clear of close relationships because I can't stand being pucked apart and asked too many qurstions. And I have always been very honest with people.

I remain vague, at most... I hate lies

I prefer to be honest, but in some situations its better to only give half the truth or just not say anything at all about something.

I don't know, but I'm sure I must have felt bad about it. I even feel guilty when I don't tell something that is considered wrong, usually by parents, teachers. That's it. I can't change my mind flexibly enough...


Yes, it happens. Usually I must accept a trade off between accuracy and economy. I can't expect anyone to listen to thorough explanations, though there are refreshing exceptions to it.


The higher I regard someone and the closer she or he is to me the more I feel the need to be honest. I think this mentality is largely responsible for my suckage at romantic relationships. In those kind of relationships there are strict 'gender roles', and according to what I know of it, it always requires some pretense and way more lies and withheld truth that my personality can easily handle.


When I really don't want to tell something I always have to remind myself why, and for good reason. For example, if I was about to leave the company I work to I wouldn't tell it to my boss until I know the path to my next workplace (or know what I would do after I left).

Ah yes, the embarrassing purple past. I'm reluctant to go into details of mine when in a relationship, because it's done so much damage when I've done that before, and because I know how I've felt when it's been done to me. I tend to treat it like the "rehabilitation of offenders" law which gives you a clean sheet after a set number of years, so that you can pretend it never happened.

Frankly I get the feeling that most of us would prefer to have virgins as partners. We don't usually think this consciously, we just think "oh, you can't do that these days, it's too Victorian, too unrealistic, too silly, too puritanical!, no I'm not like that!" But if so, why do people feel bad when their partner talks about the sexual details of their past? I think that basically they're happy with the non-virgin unless they have to bring it into full consciousness by really seeing what they did that makes them a non-virgin.

But if you hide away all the sexual past and the partner finds anything out from other sources, you have undermined their trust and they may well think that you would also have an affair now without telling them. They see that you are capable of working them, keeping them in the dark about your past "affairs," so they're afraid that you will also find it easy to keep them in the dark if you had an affair in the here and now. Double trouble.

I once tried to force a partner to tell me everything she'd ever done, because I wanted to purge my distrust and know that there would never again be any inexpected skeletons to hurt me. But I couldn't handle the information, and the images of her being seduced rattled round my head for days, and it felt almost as bad as an affair. It did no good.

The worst kind of sexual honesty came from the ones who would smile at what for them were fond memories.......one lady remarked with some pride that she'd had it over a five-bar gate. That image haunted and hurt me for a long time. If she'd expressed regret (because of a deep understanding of what it meant to our relationship), I might have felt better, but the way she seemed to celebrate such a memory, that was hard to take.

I don't think it's kind or wise to go into great detail about past sexual encounters. I've had some very good sexual experiences in the past but I wouldn't want to go into the details with a current partner. So I give such things out on a need-to-know basis, and frankly there's usually no need for them to know the giory details. It's so easy to hurt - even knowing a partner used condoms with her ex, which was in some way useful info that I asked for, even that adds to the detail of what they used to do, and although it's in the past, I don't want to have those details, because it makes it too real. It may be the truth but I don't want to go there. And that's a mild example - I accepted the pain because it was nobody's fault on that occasion, but I still saw the thing as a wart on our relationship, albeit a small wart.

I can feel very sensitive about these things. A partner told me that her ex had once helped her by booting out an unwanted suitor....her ex was a big guy, and I'm not. At the time we talked, she was still seeing her ex, and didn't seem to think it important to avoid even being alone with him.......I'd been hoping that he'd just fade away without my having to tell her that I was uncomfortable with her closeness to him....eventually we discussed it, quite successfully, and I got the impression that she was playing down her ense of attachment to him, which scared me because I didn't want her running around with anybody while unaware of the strenght of her feelings for him, so I reminded her of the time he'd helped her, and asked her if she agreed with me that most women would feel very warm to a big man who fought off a sexual predator. She did agree, but as she thought about what I'd said, she smiled warmly to herself, which hurt me......and every time that thought came back to me, I felt hurt. It didn't wreck the conversation or the relationship.....I realised that non-virgins can make partners jealous in such ways even if they don't mean to, just by discussing exes, and that this wasn't to become a feature of our relationship for good - it was only necessary to talk about it at all in order to learn how to work out what to do about the fact that she still seemed to want to see him alone. And at least she'd agreed with my point, that her feelings for him might be expected to be still quite strong.....if she'd denied her feelings in order to make me feel safe, I would have sensed her playing them down and felt that she was being dangerously dishonest with herself, possibly even deliberately lying, but no, we were on the same page, so as well as the twinge of jealousy, I had a twinge of security from that knowledge.

So my advice would be:
1. Don't talk about past sexual things unless there's a good reason to know - a blanket "honesty is the best policy" approach isn't appropriate here. Sensitivity and discretion are better. Even if they ask, remember that they might get more hurt than they thought they would, so warn them of the delicacy of the situation and make sure they really want to know. It's not the same as revealing a current thing.
2. If you must reveal a thing, try to see it as they might, not as you do, when you speak of it, so that they will see that you feel their pain. Avoid anything too graphic, keep it as non-sexual and matter-of-fact as you can. It's not as if they don't know that you must have had sex with others before they came along, so they don't need a porn story to understand that. Nobody, especially your partner, wants a ringside seat to watch you humping....your sexual memories aren't entertaining in anybody else's head except your own.
3. Remember it won't be perfect or easy. Expect the listener to become scared and jealous. If you work through it, you hopefully won't need to have such a difficult conversation again. Use as much patience as it takes.

Aspies often go into data-dump mode, where they say everything they know about a subject. It's not necessarily dishonest to "censor" some of it, although it's technically hard for us because of our condition. I've known partners who were very honest but couldn't make me sure of their sexual safety, and only part of that is down to my insecurities. The other part is inadequate communication. Fix that, and you've got it made, IMHO.

Yes I think that I sometimes confuse that with being dishonest....really it can be more of a feeling of inadequacy at failing to tell all there is to tell.....not quite the same as hiding things, and sometimes we have to hide things in order to highight other things....more is less.


I've heard of this NT "more closeness less honesty" thing before. Problem is, if I did it and admitted I did it, then I couldn't do it, because it would be known that I was a liar. But I don't think it's universal. I know of people who are OK with a truthful but kindly-delivered opinion about their choice of clothes and general appearance. I do tend to bite my tongue a lot when I feel like sharing my negative thoughts, which has often felt like a deceptive whitewash, but I also think that there's a time and place for some of the things I think, and that I shouldn't necessarily let the raw thoughts come straight out, because I can communicate the problem (negative thoughts always reflect a problem) more accurately if I think about how best to say it to the person I'm with.


Yes it helps to know that your're only doing it to defend your livelihood.

OK, this has always been one of my biggest issues. I'm painfully blunt & honest. Yes, I know I hurt people's feelings at times. But lying actually takes an effort on my part. I can do it under pressure, such as trying to catch a checkfraud at Wal*Mart one time (I almost blew that one, too btw)but it is physically tiring. Generally, if someone is trying to get me to disclose things I'm uncomfortable with, I use mis-direction. Or try to change the subject.
Of course, as a kid I got accused of lying. A lot. It was the lack of Eye Contact Thing, I've come to realize..

Matt

I've never understood why people get upset when they hear that their partner had past relationships. That was before we got together (hopefully) so why would I care?

I have nothing against lying as long as it benefits me a lot. If it doesn't benefit me or the gain is barely noticeable I will be quite honest.

I see myself as an honest person. I think everyone lies no matter how much they say how honest they are. Even lot of people here have admitted they lie such as pretending they get something or pretending to understand it or making up stuff about themselves because they don't like to tell people about themselves so they make up details. Plus putting in your fake birth date is lying. Even putting in a fake name when you register on forums because they ask for your first and last name is also lying.


I hate lying but sometimes I don't hate it if I am embarrassed about something or trying to protect myself from bullies. I don't think not saying things isn't lying because then by that logic everyone lies when they fail to mention things. It never occurs to me to mention things so would that mean I am lying? Lot of women don't even mention they were raped so would they be lying? How many of us don't mention we have AS? Are we lying? If no one ever asks, how can that be lying? There are lot of things we don't mention because it doesn't ever occur to us. And there are things people don't like to talk about due to the emotional pain so would that mean they are lying? But sometimes I have felt dishonest when I fail to mention something because I felt I was being misleading. One time I was talking about Lisa Nowak to my mother and I didn't say she got diagnosed with AS. Honestly that is a touchy subject for me so that is why I didn't mention it. But when I think of it this way, would it be really relevant to tell her she got diagnosed with AS after the attempted murder kidnapping incident?


I also understand why talking about your past partners be bad. If you are talking s**t about them and it doesn't matter if what you are saying it true, it just makes you look bad. The guy you're seeing would be wondering what bad things would you be saying about him if you two dated and were together. If you mention you have had past relationships and neither of them worked out, that would probably be okay. But what if the guy asks you why you broke up? I guess that be okay to talk s**t about them because he did ask. But I have been guilty talking about mine because no one would tell me why I shouldn't do it. Telling me my current partner wouldn't want to hear about them wasn't enough. I had to know why and no one would tell me. Then I was reading a childfree blog and the blogger wrote about people who talk s**t about their ex's and she mentioned in it how does she know you aren't going to say s**t about her and how does she know you aren't admitting your own faults and that you did things wrong too in the relationship and are failing to mention that. That made sense and how hard is it to say that when I ask why?



I used to make my last ex cry because I was too honest. I don't know if he was just too sensitive (I think he was) or if I really said the wrong things. Maybe both. My husband says I am honest to a fault and I say lot of things he doesn't take seriously because he knows I "don't mean it." Very rarely have I upset him. Every time I make someone laugh, I always wonder if I had said something wrong. If someone makes a face when I mention I said something, I wonder if it was wrong to say it. When I first knew my husband, he used to open his mouth a lot when I talk to him and then he quit doing it. He said he had gotten used to me so it doesn't shock him anymore.

There are minor lies in defense such as not giving information (which the only people who consider that lying are nosy people who feel entitled you give them answers to every question even personal information) but for the most part from what I've seen, I am more honest than most people I've come across.

Have also noticed people tend to believe the liars and don't even ask for the other side of the story. Have had people lie about me before which resulted in me being outcasted, my reputation ruined. I was very shy and quiet and if those people judged me by my actions and how I am as a person they would have known the other person was a liar.

I withhold information. That is considered lying but because I don't know someone and feel it's none of their business I just don't answer as I don't like feeling as though this person asking all these personal questions feels entitled to answers. No, it's none of your business where I live, sorry. Especially if I just met you.

I've had dealt with several injustices over others lying and people believing the liars and instantly assuming their version to be true. Outcasted.

It seems to me that the majority of people don't really pick up on liars and often cast the person telling the truth branding them as the liar especially if you are awkward. The other person lying with a straight face is revealed later on when the person turns on another person or sometimes not even at all.

I've been kicked out of my roomate's place over the other roomate who was filling his head with lies. I left crying and she remained. After months go by though he starts to see what she really was. She played mind games turning people against each other and stole. Years go by and he apologizes which is something that doesn't happen often. I'm used to having to just go away so the liar can have their way.

I've never played games like that with people. Those are awful lies.

I can't imagine that there are people on this planet that lie to others ALL THE DAMN TIME or at least trying to!

Is hypocrisy a form of dishonesty because I really despise hypocrisy. As far as the little white lie goes, I don't mind them too much. Subjectivity is simply subjective so often truth is confused with opinion and vice versa so what exactly is "honesty?" Just the ability to state your opinion ad nauseam? The world is full of people who love to do that. To state opinion over and over in the guise of "honesty" is itself a lie.

This has been a huge issue for me. I know I'm honest, but people always believe the other person (its usually a female manipulating someone. Don't ask me why, I just notice patterns!)over me. Annoying doesn't come close. <GROWL>
As for me, I have a hard time when strangers ask how I am at work. I know its courtesy, but I give out too much information. Or flat tell them, Which isn't good because something is always hurting ( I have Crohn's disease & Osteoarthritis also).

Sincerely,
Matt

I tell plausible lies where the truth would be too confusing for them to deal with. Most people want a consistent storyline more than anything.