Someone who always lies: understanding lies, protecting trust

Friday night, a pizzeria. A friend tells everyone he met a famous footballer at the airport. He says they talked for ages, adds one detail, then another. Someone asks a question. You stay silent: that very day he had texted you that he was at home with a fever.

You might have misunderstood. A date can slip, a memory can get muddled. But it isn’t the first time something hasn’t added up. There was that trip whose details kept changing. That job he got, then never started. That important acquaintance nobody ever met.

At first you let it go. Then you start listening in a different way. While he talks, you compare, you remember, you look for confirmation. And perhaps this is what upsets you most: you went out to spend time with a friend and find yourself checking a story.

What is a lie looking for?

Faced with someone who lies often, the words come quickly: serial liar, narcissist, manipulator. They give a name to our discomfort and, for a moment, we feel we have understood.

But naming a behaviour doesn’t mean knowing its reason.

Sometimes the advantage of a lie is obvious: avoiding a responsibility, getting something, hiding something one has done. At other times it is less visible. That extraordinary story might be seeking attention, approval, a place in the conversation. It might serve to cover a sense of shame. These are possibilities, not explanations to apply to everyone.

Does the friend at the pizzeria want to impress the table? Is he afraid that his life, told as it is, would interest no one? Or is he trying to get something we can’t yet see? From that evening, we cannot know.

We can, however, notice what is happening between us.

Lying, to some degree, is a common experience. We say we like the present, that we are nearly there while we are still looking for our keys, that everything is fine because we don’t feel like explaining. These situations have different intentions and consequences. Putting them all on the same level keeps us from understanding when lying begins to take up too much room.

A study by Kim Serota and colleagues, published in 2010, showed that the lies reported by participants were concentrated mainly in a small part of the sample. The data concerned what people reported about the previous twenty-four hours: on its own, it did not make it possible to tell a habit apart from a clinical problem.

Studies on pathological lying also invite us to make distinctions. Drew Curtis and Christian Hart have proposed recognising as a specific condition a form of lying that is persistent, pervasive and associated with distress or difficulties in daily life. It is a research proposal, not a label we can pin on an acquaintance.

Lying often is not, on its own, enough to conclude that a person has a narcissistic disorder either. We can describe the lies we have heard and their consequences. A diagnosis takes a great deal more.

Between what we know and what we tell

Saint Augustine, in De mendacio, distinguishes error from lying. Someone who asserts something false believing it to be true is mistaken. Someone who says what they believe to be false with the intention of deceiving, on the other hand, is lying.

It is a distinction that asks for our attention even when we are hurt. A contradiction can give rise to a question; it does not automatically hand us the certainty of a deception.

When the falsehoods keep repeating themselves, however, that question becomes hard to ignore. And it may bring another with it: how much does it cost this person to show themselves without adding anything?

Perhaps some stories are born right there, in the distance between the life one has and the one one would like to show. We cannot presume it is always so. We can leave this possibility open without using it to justify everything.

There is something here that concerns us too, for all the differences: the wish to be accepted, the fear of seeming uninteresting, the temptation to make some part of our story more beautiful. Recognising this can make us less hasty in judging. It doesn’t cancel the responsibility for what we say.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says: “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free”. He is speaking of the relationship with him and of freedom from sin, not of the small falsehoods of an evening among friends. That bond between truth and freedom, though, makes me think of the effort of having to sustain an invented version of oneself.

Remembering what you said. To whom. Which detail you added. Avoiding a question because it might lead straight to the point you wanted to hide.

How much room is left to really meet someone, if every word has to be guarded?

When you no longer know what to believe

So far we have looked mainly at the person who lies. But you are there too, on the other side.

There are the promises you organised yourself around. The decisions you made trusting a story. The times you defended that person, only to discover that you were missing part of the story.

And there is a weariness that is hard to explain: no longer knowing when you can stop checking. Even an ordinary sentence becomes something to examine. You wonder whether you are exaggerating, whether you have become too suspicious, whether next time will be different.

Trying to understand someone’s reasons doesn’t oblige you to treat what happened to you as irrelevant. You can be fond of him and need distance. You can listen to an explanation and still not feel ready to trust.

Trust doesn’t come back just because it is asked for. It needs to find confirmation in behaviour, even in ordinary details: a promise kept, a mistake admitted without inventing another version, a willingness to answer for what one has done.

It isn’t up to you to build that confirmation in the other person’s place.

Back to that table

So what can you do about the friend at the pizzeria?

If you want to talk about it, you can choose a moment when the two of you are alone. Start from one specific episode, without turning his whole person into an accusation: “You told me you were at home that day. Tonight you told a different story. I don’t understand, and this situation puts me in a difficult position.”

Then listen. Not least to leave room for an explanation you hadn’t considered.

If the inconsistencies continue, you can say what you need: not to have to guess every time which version is true. You can also explain that his company matters to you without any extraordinary encounters to tell about. But your affection cannot guarantee that anything will change.

When lying is persistent and brings suffering or damages relationships, it may be appropriate to turn to a professional. You can suggest it respectfully. It is not your place to take on that role.

And if the lies keep drawing you into situations that harm you, you can choose how much room to give that relationship. You don’t need to reach a definitive explanation of the other person in order to recognise a limit of your own.

In Collodi’s book, the Fairy tells Pinocchio that lies are recognised at once: some have short legs, others a long nose. In our relationships it isn’t always so simple. Sometimes we notice them little by little, when the details stop fitting together.

Then a moment comes when something true is said and we can no longer take it in without doubting. It is one of the most painful consequences of repeated lies: even sincerity, when it finally finds its place, has to make its way through the mistrust that has built up.

Perhaps, thinking back to that pizzeria, you no longer care whether the footballer was really there. What you miss is being able to listen to your friend without keeping count.

Have you ever lost this peace of mind with someone? What helped you understand whether you could trust them again?

References

• Kim B. Serota, Timothy R. Levine and Franklin J. Boster, The Prevalence of Lying in America: Three Studies of Self-Reported Lies, 2010.
• Drew A. Curtis and Christian L. Hart, Pathological Lying: Theoretical and Empirical Support for a Diagnostic Entity, 2020.
• Augustine of Hippo, On Lying (De mendacio; Italian translation).
• Gospel of John 8:31–36, Italian CEI 2008 translation.
• Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio, chapter XVII (Italian original).