The Importance of Honesty in Relationships
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007I don’t write about relationships often, mainly because that is the area of 360 Degree Success that I know the least about. I am the child of separated parents, and I have had several unsuccessful attempts at relationships in my past. (Maybe I should just refer to them as “challenging learning experiences”).
That being said, I am striving for an ideal in my relationships that is even harder to attain, because it takes two people with a complete commitment to achieve. Basically, the level of honesty that I try to have with myself is hard enough. It’s even harder to sustain with another person.
Why is that? First of all, your partner also has to have an absolute commitment to being honest with him- or herself, as well as the courage to deal with truths that come up that may not be easy. Also, other issues, such as previous traumas, trust issues, and fear of abandonment tend to get in the way of this honesty.
What has happened to me in the past, is that the closer the couple gets, the more there is to lose– so, therefore there is more investment in keeping things stable. What does that mean, however?
It means that truths (either internal or external) that could “rock the boat” tend to get suppressed. This can be conscious or subconscious suppression, but it is suppression of the truth nonetheless.
This can all be done in the guise of “not wanting to hurt the other person,” but usually it is really about protecting an investment– the security of the relationship.
The insidious thing is that this level of dishonesty actually eats away at the relationship from the inside, like termites. The trust begins to erode as both people usually feel when things are going unsaid. Even if you don’t know what the other person is hiding, you know (even if only subconsciously) that YOU are hiding something.
This leads to the communication breaking down, and once the communication starts to break down there is more to complain about– silently, in your own head. But you dare not talk about the problems with communication, for fear of “rocking the boat”. Yikes. What a situation.
I read recently about a couple who are filing for a divorce because they caught each other cheating online. The funny thing is, that they were both cheating on each other with each other. (The husband was cheating on his wife with his wife’s online persona, and visa versa). They didn’t know this because they were both using internet screen names, “Sweetie” and “Prince of Joy”.
The strangest thing is that they both thought they had found their true soul mates online. They each poured out their hearts to the other about how bad their marriage was, and how their spouse no longer really understood them anymore. The wife was quoted as saying, “I thought I had found the love of my life. The way this Prince of Joy spoke to me, the things he wrote, the tenderness in every expression was something I had never had in my marriage.”
The husband, Prince of Joy, said, “I was so happy to have found a woman who finally understood me. Then it turned out that I hadn’t found anyone new at all. To be honest I still find it hard to believe that the person, Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things to me on the internet, is actually the same woman I married and who has not said a nice word to me for years.”
I can just imagine them fantasizing about leaving their current marriages in favor of connecting with their “true online soulmates”.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the movies, so the couple didn’t just “realize that they could be happy with what they already had.” Instead they both feel insulted and betrayed and are filing for divorce. Wow. What a life lesson they are both missing…
This happens exactly for the reasons I describe above. The trust with our partners erodes because of all the secrets– all the investment in not “rocking the boat”.
Now, again, I’m no expert in this area. I’m just an observer of my relationships and what I see in the relationships of others.
I just went through something like this in my current relationship, where my partner and I just realized that we had stopped being really honest with each other. And we had also stopped being completely honest with ourselves with regards to the relationship.
We were both so in fear of losing each other that we buried everything that was “wrong,” to keep the peace. But that didn’t work.
Now we’re trying again to open our hearts and be as honest as we can be with each other and with ourselves. Of course, there are no guarantees this way, but it’s the only way to be truthfully happy with each other. Or with any other person (romantically or not), for that matter.
Hope I can learn the lesson life is trying to teach me.
