KEY POINTS:
You can always tell when someone is lying. Even when they can't.
It's like cards. We all have tells. A wandering eye, a nibble of the lip, flicking away a hair that isn't there. There's always an inkling when someone isn't being straight.
We've all been there. Gone out all night and missed a meeting? Bloody traffic. A party you couldn't be bothered with? You know my migraines. I like you, really, but just as a friend. I didn't get your text ...
The problem isn't that we sometimes say one thing when we'd rather not say another, the problem is that we live in a society that places an unnecessary premium on truth.
Why is honesty so venerated when it leads to so many complications? No bullshit. Let's level with each other. To be honest with you.
The one thing all of those opening gambits have in common is that the tail end of the sentence is likely to hurt.
We lie. For many different reasons and in many different ways. In terms of human communication untruth runs the gamut from tidy little whiteys to big huge whoppers that take 15 years of inventiveness and the equivalent of a mortgage to service.
Age and income bracket are obvious areas of obfuscation but it never ceases to amaze me how easily we manage to conveniently forget all aspects of our existence, from cash cards to babies when it suits us.
Women are better at it than men, goes the truism. What rubbish. Men are far better liars than women, if only because they go to the trouble of convincing themselves of the truth of a lie before they sell it to anyone else. That's a compliment by the way, I genuinely admire the ability to tell a good lie.
I've feared lately that I might be losing my touch. Where once I blithely gabbled everything from tall tales to handy excuses, nowadays I find myself blushing infuriatingly whenever I try to say something that isn't at least semi-aligned to the truth.
As a child I could lie faster than a greyhound could run. Not because of any inherent duplicity in my nature, rather because I genuinely believed in my own stories. Of course I didn't feed my little brother a bar of soap; he ate it because he wanted to blow bubbles. Why would I have worn your earrings and lost them mother? Of course I didn't. A big bird flew in off the roof and grabbed them out of the box. A giant purple bird. That talked. And said he bet you'd blame me.
Of course this illustrates the next important rule of lies; never over- embellish. Lies are the little black dresses of language. Simple, classic, effective. Resist at all costs the urge to over-embroider your lie. Lies work best when they lie as close as possible to truth.
It's always best to stick closely to what really did happen and just colour around the edges with your fantasy. The reason for that is simple. You have to lie in such a way you believe it too.
Believing ones own lies, besides being a recipe for a miserable existence, is very important if one aspires to being a very good liar. It means you give a better performance and it minimises tells.
Fibbing is a fool's game without the personal buy-in. Follow that one rule and there's literally no limit to the fun you can have with lies.
That's the problem though. We're not meant to have fun with lies. We're not supposed to lie full-stop.
The only thing worse than looking ugly, is looking stupid and being lied to. It makes us look and feel like idiots. How hurtful, how upsetting is that yawning gulf that suddenly stretches out between yourself and someone you realise has been taking you for a ride?
Lies mean that someone else thinks they're cleverer than you, that someone else believes, in the immortal words of Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men, you can't handle the truth.
The most basic function of a lie is to keep one's true intentions secret.
Liars tend to be lonely. A necessary consequence of always choosing the curly road rather than the straight.
But that's not to say that they don't function as people, or fail when it comes to achieving intimacy.
There are different limits when it comes to trust, as most relationships illustrate. I know as many couples who insist on full and frank disclosure of every private thought as I do pairs of people who believe that what happens on tour should stay there and who cares what it takes to keep that sort of carry-on firmly under the veil.
And it works better than that, for some people. There is one reason more than any other why in Carmela Soprano, actress Edie Falco has created one of the most resonant, rounded screen characters of our time. Carmela believes lies. She believes them because she has to, it's impossible for her to function any other way. Facing the true extent of her husbands murderousness, the horror of what he does, would make it impossible for her to continue with her life as it is.
And so Carmela endures. She continues with her cooking and her worrying and her solicitude for a bunch of criminals.
Every so often though, the mask slips and she's faced with the ugly reality of the man she loves.
What does she do in those situations? The same as the rest of us; she smiles and she looks the other way. Believing one's own lie is a good beginning, but it takes two people to really make it fly.