The Kind Lie Protects the Wrong Person
Beneath the Surface · By Ali Daudji ·
The haircut is already on her head when she asks what you think.
That is the whole situation. Nothing you say will put the hair back. Your real reaction happened in the first half second, before you had any say in it, and what she's asking for now is that half second, told back to her. She stands there, hopeful, under the new bangs.
"I love it."
I've said it about haircuts. I've said it about paint colors, and about a coat that could not be returned. I've said it quickly, because speed is part of the craft. A kind lie delivered slowly is just bad news with manners.
The lie has real things going for it, and I want to say them before I take it apart. The truth here fixes nothing. The hair will grow on its own schedule whether or not she goes six weeks knowing you winced. All the truth can do now is hurt someone you love, and declining to hurt someone you love looks less like a failure than like the job itself.
I believed that for years. Watching what the lie does after it leaves your mouth wore the belief down, and an essay from 1975 finished it.
She felt the pause. Not every time, but often enough, because people who love you have been studying you for years without meaning to, and they catch the half second when your face votes before your mouth does. So now she has two answers that disagree. Hers, which has been nagging at her since the salon mirror. Yours, which says the bangs are lovely. One of them must be wrong, and you're the person she trusts most in the world. So she does the loving thing, the obedient thing. She overrules herself.
That's the part I can no longer defend. The lie set out to protect her from one bad evening. Applied gently over years, it teaches her that her unease was nothing, and that when her perception and my sentence disagree, the sentence wins. I meant to spare her feelings. I trained her out of trusting them.
The essay is Adrienne Rich's "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying," from 1975, collected later in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. She was writing about honesty between women, inside a movement in the middle of discovering how much it had been lied to and about. I went in for the history and kept catching my own reflection. A few of the sentences wouldn't stay put.
Rich has no patience for the kind liar's favorite explanation. The liar, she writes, may say, I didn't want to cause pain, when "what she really did not want is to have to deal with the other's pain." Sparing her the pain would be a gift. Sparing myself the sight of her pain is a comfort that presents itself as the gift. Then she names the maneuver: "The lie is a short-cut through another's personality."
The long way through a person is the conversation you were avoiding. Her face doing what it will do. Her twenty minutes too close to the mirror, her asking again on Thursday, you giving the same true answer a second time, and October doing the rest. The long way is slow, and it needs her in it. The lie gets you both to bedtime without traveling through her at all. It just handles her. And people can always, eventually, tell when they have been handled.
This works best on exactly the people we love. Rich describes how much of a life arrives on trust. Someone tells you where they lived in 1950, and the sentence goes into you unchecked. "I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways," she writes, "on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you." Every answer you give her goes into the world she walks around in. The closer the teller, the less checking there is. So the kind lie is never delivered to her defenses. It's delivered to the one place she stopped defending because it was you.
It does something to the teller too. The moment you said "I love it," you split in two: the one who winced, and the one who spoke. She is now in a relationship with the second one. I know that second man well. He is agreeable, and he is not quite me, and each kind lie widens the gap a little. "The liar has many friends," Rich writes, "and leads an existence of great loneliness." Everyone adores the agreeable one. Nobody has met the other one.
None of this is a case for the unrequested truth. Volunteering that you hate someone's nose isn't honesty; it's just aim. Rich is explicit that an honest relationship does not require her "to understand everything, or tell you everything at once." Tact gets to choose which truth, and when. It does not get to hand over a false one and call that love. The kind lie is different in one exact way. It arrives where truth was asked for. She came to you on purpose, to check what she saw against what you see, because yours is the eye she calibrates by.
The strongest case for the lie is that she was not really asking about the hair. "What do you think," in that moment, is supposed to be a request for reassurance, which "I love it" answers honestly. That one worked on me for longer. But she gets to decide what she was asking. Answering an easier question than the one she brought is the shortcut again, one layer down.
Rich offers a practice instead. A relationship in which love is a real word, she says, is "a process of refining the truths they can tell each other," and one reason she gives for attempting anything that hard is that "we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us." Refining is small work. It is the next asked question, answered honestly in words she can actually use: "I think the longer cut framed your face better. This one will get there." It's harder to say than the lie, and it isn't brutal. It is the same love with the false bottom taken out.
Your praise begins to mean something again. The person known to say the true thing is the person whose "I love it" can be believed all the way down. A kind liar ends up believed the way a waiter is believed when he says good choice.
The bangs grow out by October either way. What stays is the world you handed her. Every kind lie gives someone you love a world retouched slightly in your favor and asks her to live there, and she will, because trusting you is what she does instead of checking. You will stand beside her in the world as it is, alone with the difference. I don't think that's kindness. I think it is the loneliest available way to be close to someone. I would rather we lived in the same world.