Ask Ellie: How can I trust that people are who they say they are?

Dear Ellie,

How do you know, like really know, if someone is who they say they are, if they’re actually not a lying, pants-on-fire deception mongerer?

I have had a series of bombs dropped on me recently that shattered my initial perception of who people were. Two new romantic relationships turned out to be built on lies and half-truths about the other person’s history and who they were. And I can’t see how to avoid the web on the front end and save my heart and mind some battering.

I’m trained as a philosopher where “the truth” is a matter of logical relations between premises. But in relationships, it feels impossible to get to a valid conclusion about someone’s character without getting to know them over time in a lot of vulnerable situations. Even then they could have a mental break or get a railroad spike through the skull, show one loose thread in their web of lies that unravels the whole thing, or or or. I guess I’m just exhausted feeling like I have to become Magnum P.I. just to make sure someone is basically who they say they are, so I can open the visor of my full-body armor. I’m longing for a way to be open and shrewd both, to discover the truthfulness of another and have healthy expectations of what living a truthful life requires of me.

From,

Unwilling Relationship Detective

Dear URD,

I’m sorry you’re at the “what if they have a mental break or get a railroad spike through the skull” stage of dating. It’s exhausting, having your trust trampled over and over — and so easy to start feeling like Diogenes, wandering Ancient Greece with a lantern, searching for an honest man.

Diogenes was an original Cynic, and his search was performance art, intended only to show that there was no such thing as an honest man. But then, he was also known for living in an enormous jar and masturbating in public, so let’s try to put a bit of daylight between our position and his.

Diogenes was right up to a point — I’d venture to say that everyone lies. Life would be an awful lot more difficult if we didn’t allow ourselves the fibs and omissions that lubricate the social fabric. But what you’re talking about is different. The lies these potential partners have been dumping on you are what Socrates (via Plato) called “the lie in the soul” — the kind of lie that penetrates to your core and that you accept as truth. Trusting someone who’s not who they say they are is a devastating lie in the soul, because — as you well know — it can make you question your judgment about every damn person you love and might love in the future.

Please know this: when someone hides their true colours from you, the lie is never in your soul alone. It’s so easy, when we’ve been deceived or let down, to feel manipulated, tricked, conned. Often, that’s what smarts most: the sense of having been targeted or worked over by someone we cared about.

But people lie about who they are because they don’t like themselves or their lives, can’t accept themselves, or fear revealing their true self even to themselves. In other words, the lie is first in their own soul, as a story of their unworthiness or brokenness.

Think of Dorian Gray, who presents a face of angelic beauty out in the world while the evidence of his crimes collects on his portrait back at home. Dorian’s a deceitful bastard, but he’s a bastard driven by a lie in his soul: that he’ll be worthless once his youth wilts. This misapprehension sends him into a panic in the book’s first pages, and he spends the rest of his story labouring under it.

I’m sure this earnest reading would make Oscar Wilde wince, but this is the human truth underlying the story’s cynical flourishes: fear drives cruelty.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not getting all kumbaya on you. I’m not saying the important thing here is to cultivate compassion for the exes who’ve screwed you over. Fuck that, and don’t for even a moment second-guess any anger you feel towards them. Righteous fury with the Dorian Grays in our pasts is an important defense mechanism. It helps sharpen our instincts against repeat offences.

No: I’d advise reframing dishonesty as evidence of suffering from here on out as a matter of practicality, not piety. It simply makes it far easier to detect someone’s bullshit.

When you conceive of a lie as a personal attack, you’re invested in not seeing it. It’s very dangerous for the psyche to believe that it’s under constant threat of targeted attack, so it will choose, whenever possible, to blink strategically when people reveal their darkness — and never more so than with people we like or might be starting to love, people we deeply want to trust. (And when the psyche does start to think it’s under constant attack, you know what happens: out comes the full-body armor. Besides being a pain in the arse to walk around in, that armour can drive a person to desperate loneliness and even a twitchy, tweaked-out sort of solipsism. There’s soul death in it, for sure.)

But people’s sadness, their anger, their fear, the ways in which they resist and reject themselves? In other words, the stuff that lies beneath their lies? There’s no reason for your psyche to protect itself from all that. And truly, it’s surprising how readily people reveal these things about themselves — through grandiosity, inconsistent behaviour, making rash or unrealistic promises, speaking poorly of people from their past, or simply not having a sense of humour about themselves. Or think of Dorian Gray. If Tinder delivered you a dude who was famous around town for not aging or changing in two decades, you could consider that a red flag. Peter Pan Syndrome is always bad news.

If you stay alert to this kind of inner conflict in the humans you meet, and make sure not to blink when it shows up, your radar won’t be as screwy as if you’re searching for lies. Even better: you’ll get a clearer picture of the whole person, and dating might start to feel less like blasting a hairdryer directly into your own mouth and more like exploration — like a series of forays into the human jungle.

And I’m sad and tired and ecstatic to remind you that human nature — the nature of humans collectively and the nature of the person who sits across from you at dinner every day — is always going to be a jungle. Just when we think we’ve charted the whole territory, some insane tree will sprout or we’ll find a new kind of spider. Yes, this can fucking suck, because who ever wants to find a new kind of spider? But it’s also life itself: it’s mystery and possibility and great sex and a reason to keep getting up in the morning hungry for your own days. Just remember that the jungle isn’t out to get you, personally. It has its own shit going on. And you, my friend, are not an unwilling detective but an intrepid explorer.

Love,

Ellie