Why Men Lie
Why Men Lie (and always will) by Vince Passaro
Before I pulled my Roberto Duran, before I moved out, before I lost the ability to go forward in what had been a long and rich and difficult and painful and profoundly rewarding marriage with three great children—before I lost the strength and desire, to put the matter more precisely, to try to be the person I was supposed to be and hide the one I’d become, I asked my wife: “Why do men lie so much?” I can see now that the long pondering I’d been doing on the subject of men and lies was a circling-the-airport approach to where I might land, which was my own conscience.
“Your sperm makes you evil,” my wife said. “It does something to your minds.”
“No, seriously,” I said.
“Because you’re all cowards,” she said.
“That’s a little too serious,” I said. “Do you have anything between the two?”
“In between the two,” she said, “is just a charred landscape.”
There are things that everyone almost always lies about (cheating, stealing, sex), and there are things that women almost always lie about (food, money, orgasms), and then there’s the rest of life, which generally comprises what men tend to lie about. A female friend says of the men she’s known: “Are its lips moving? Then it’s lying.”
I’m talking about the issue later at a party with a fellow I’ve met (during this period I talked about it a lot with many people—friends, acquaintances, and people, like this guy, that I’d just met); he plays poker, sometimes for a living, other times merely competitively—this is very high-stakes poker. Average annual American college-grad salaries frequently rest on the table. Games can go on for more than twenty-four hours. Someday, it’s my guess, he’ll get close to a woman who doesn’t want him to play this kind of poker or, in fact, since this is the only kind of poker that he’s interested in, any poker at all. He’ll promise not to, and then he’ll join the eternal cycle.
“Men pretty much always lie to avoid conflict, argument, the
Before I pulled my Roberto Duran, before I moved out, before I lost the ability to go forward in what had been a long and rich and difficult and painful and profoundly rewarding marriage with three great children—before I lost the strength and desire, to put the matter more precisely, to try to be the person I was supposed to be and hide the one I’d become, I asked my wife: “Why do men lie so much?” I can see now that the long pondering I’d been doing on the subject of men and lies was a circling-the-airport approach to where I might land, which was my own conscience.
“Your sperm makes you evil,” my wife said. “It does something to your minds.”
“No, seriously,” I said.
“Because you’re all cowards,” she said.
“That’s a little too serious,” I said. “Do you have anything between the two?”
“In between the two,” she said, “is just a charred landscape.”
There are things that everyone almost always lies about (cheating, stealing, sex), and there are things that women almost always lie about (food, money, orgasms), and then there’s the rest of life, which generally comprises what men tend to lie about. A female friend says of the men she’s known: “Are its lips moving? Then it’s lying.”
I’m talking about the issue later at a party with a fellow I’ve met (during this period I talked about it a lot with many people—friends, acquaintances, and people, like this guy, that I’d just met); he plays poker, sometimes for a living, other times merely competitively—this is very high-stakes poker. Average annual American college-grad salaries frequently rest on the table. Games can go on for more than twenty-four hours. Someday, it’s my guess, he’ll get close to a woman who doesn’t want him to play this kind of poker or, in fact, since this is the only kind of poker that he’s interested in, any poker at all. He’ll promise not to, and then he’ll join the eternal cycle.
“Men pretty much always lie to avoid conflict, argument, the