In this post, I will share five reasons men lie so much.
This will help you understand men’s rationales when they’re not honest with you. You are reading the post probably means that a man in your life has not been truthful with you, or you’ve caught him in a lie.
You can check out this post if you feel he is lying intuitively but have no clear evidence: 9 signs he’s lying to you (and what to do about it).
I’m sorry if that’s happened to you. But hopefully, this will shed some understanding on why he’s done it so you can make an informed decision on whether you want to stay in a relationship with him.
So we’re diving into that.
1 They’re afraid of hurting your feelings
The first one men lie so much is that they’re afraid of hurting your feelings.
This is a big one. When a man is in a relationship with a woman, and she’s asking him for some feedback, and he recognizes that if he tells her the truth, it will hurt her feelings, men will probably take the path of least resistance.
They won’t share that because they care about their partner. They care about their partner more than they care about telling the truth.
For example, you ask him how you look in a specific outfit, and he doesn’t like how you look. He will say you look great. That is a lie from his perspective, but he’s saying it because he doesn’t want to hurt you, right?
So if you sense that man is just telling you what you want to hear rather than what you need to hear or what you’re asking for, you can invite him into a space of being honest with you. Because usually, if a guy is doing this, he’s doing it to protect you. He’s doing it because he thinks your feelings are more important than the truth.
You can talk to him the way it’s essential that you’re always honest with me, and if you tell me the truth, I promise you that I’m not going to take it personally, right? I’m not going to lash out at you about it.
If you help cultivate a sense of safety for him, that will help him be more honest with you in those situations.
2 He deflects being vulnerable
Number two is that he is deflecting being vulnerable.
Many times men will lie because they are trying to avoid being vulnerable and open with you because they’ve created a story. If they’re vulnerable, share what they’re struggling about what they’re dealing with, or opening their heart to you, they’re going to be seen as weak. It’s going to sabotage the relationship or create conflict in some way.
An example is if he comes home, and you can tell he had a really rough day and is not doing well. You ask him how he’s doing, and he says, ” Oh, I’m fine.” That’s a lie.
He is necessarily like a dishonest person or someone who doesn’t want to tell you the truth. It might be that he’s scared to be vulnerable with you because he doesn’t want to seem weak.
I know that in my relationship, the past relationships, and particularly in my current relationship, I’ve been dealing with this throat issue. I’ve had this throat pain that I’ve been dealing with for almost five months since march, and there are times when it bothers me.
I’ll be out with my fantastic girlfriend and excellent partner, and I’ll struggle. I will have much resistance.
She’ll ask me how I’m doing, and I have much resistance sharing with her that I’m in pain because I don’t want to bum her out and darken the mood of our experience. I don’t want the whole conversation to revolve around me and what I’m dealing with.
I’ve created a story that we need to be muscular and soldier on at some point and not let our partner see that we’re in pain or struggling.
Suppose a man deflects vulnerability with dishonesty to you.
In that case, there’s an opportunity for you to lovingly not accept it, to be instead like, well, my experience of you now is you’re in pain or struggling with something. You’re safe to share that with me. I would love to hear about it to figure out how to support you. I’d love to be able to help you in whatever it is that you’re going through, so if you feel ready at any point to share with me what pain you’re in, I would love to hear about it. You see what I’m saying.
Inviting him into that vulnerability and letting him know it’s a safe space and you want to support him will encourage him to be honest with you in those situations.
3 They’re avoiding conflict
The third reason why men lie to you is that they’re avoiding conflict.
Men have a tremendous impulse to avoid conflict and confrontation. It’s hardwired for most men, especially those who are not very aggressive by nature.
Sometimes men will lie not to have to deal with it.
It might be like you go out to dinner with your parents, and he’s meeting them for the first time. Your dad is notoriously tough to get along with and abrasive, and he’s hard on your boyfriend at this dinner. Afterward, you ask him how you liked my dad, and he says your dad’s great. He’s probably not telling the truth because he’s created a story that makes you upset if he says I didn’t like your dad.
It is now going to be a conflict, a confrontation. He is afraid you will take his truth personally, resulting in an adverse row for him.
So this is an opportunity for you to reinforce to him.
You will not take his truth personally. Remind him that it’s okay if he doesn’t like your dad. You can tell him, well, it didn’t seem like you guys got along, or it seemed like that was a harrowing experience for you. Many people don’t like my dad, and I will not take it personally if you don’t like him.
It’s more critical for you to tell the truth than to tell you what you want to hear. That’s a way of offsetting that conflict and just letting him know you guys can have a constructive conflict. It doesn’t have to be a fight, even when you can not get a reconciliation.
If he wants to go to a football game, but you don’t like it, both of your truths are equally valid, and you can have a conflict around that and work through it in a constructive, loving way.
So practicing conflict resolution is very important in a relationship, particularly if you struggle to manage conflict, as I do precisely.
I don’t naturally have much experience in conflict situations because I grew up without many confrontations around my house. My parents had a no row in front of the kid’s rule, so I’ve had to learn conflict resolution in a relationship as I’ve grown up on my own.
4 They don’t think being honest always is what men should do
The fourth reason men lie in relationships is that they believe it’s what men do. They have not had a good male role model, to be honest.
Unfortunately, some men had fathers who lied to their families to get what they wanted. He was dishonest and maybe cheated on them, creating the imprint for guys of what it means to be in your masculine. He’s just got an unanchored moral compass when it comes to lying.
So if a man has demonstrated consistently to you from the beginning that he doesn’t care about telling the truth, maybe he lies about his age, he lies about little things, he lies about big things many times, it’s because that’s just what he thinks men do right, and that’s rough because that’s less of something that can be corrected.
After all, a fundamental value thing where his identity as a man is that man doesn’t have to be truthful. If a man is in that boat, you need to be more inclined to leave the relationship.
If a man is lying to you a lot and you start catching them from the very beginning lying about all sorts of weird little things for no reason, that’s a situation where you need to get out of there as soon as possible.
5 He gets outside of the boundary and doesn’t want to get caught
The last reason a man will lie to you is that he doesn’t want to get caught.
He’s done something that he knows is outside the relationship’s parameters or boundaries.
He’s maybe done something terrible like cheated on you. Or maybe he told you he was going over to a friend’s house and ended up partying with some other people. Or something he knew that you wouldn’t like. Maybe he went to a strip club with some friends rather than going to play golf.
That’s a very mundane example.
But sometimes guys will lie because they don’t want to get caught, and does that necessarily mean they are bad people? Not necessarily.
Sometimes it’s just a human nature thing. They’ve deviated from the boundaries of the relationship and lied about it.
The energy with which you come to that conversation after you catch a guy in a lie is super important because if you’re hyper-aggressive, you have that confrontation. If he’s cheated on you or anything like that 100 percent, you have a right to be angry.
But the more from a space of partnership you can come to him like, hey, that was not cool, that hurt me, and it went outside of the balance of our relationship even if you had done it by accident. I’d much rather you be honest with me than try to lie to cover it up.
You need to reinforce to him the truth that being truthful with each other is a core value for a good relationship.
If you can’t trust each other, it will undermine your relationship. Trust is the foundation of a healthy relationship.
So there’s an opportunity for you to reinforce the value of truth and take trust as the foundation of a relationship.
Conclusion
If you catch him in one of these lies denoting that he was trying to avoid getting caught for something, or maybe he acts like number four, that he’s just lying about everything all the time.
Suppose you see a man in a lie, and he honestly and authentically acknowledges that he was wrong. In that case, he doesn’t get defensive, doesn’t try to avoid it or deviate from it, and commits that he will not be dishonest to you again. For the most part, I would say he’s earned a second chance.
Suppose you feel comfortable with that, as long as he authentically and enthusiastically owns his side. In that case, he’s not trying to defend it and is open and willing to correct it and not do it again to honor your needs.
You might be worth giving him a second chance. Because we’re all human, and we all make mistakes.
But if he’s being defensive, if he is arguing for his dishonesty, if he’s gaslighting you and telling you that you’re being crazy, or if he’s lying about everything even though you’ve caught him in it, just denying them.
It would be best if you ran away from them as soon as possible. Do not sit there and expect those men to change because I promise you they will never do it.
