White Lies I Could Tell My Boyfriend, But Don’t
One day, before my boyfriend and I were actually dating — back when we were just “talking” — I got irritated with him. However, I hadn’t worked through my feelings yet, and so I could not properly articulate them.
I was in my dorm room with my roommate and her boyfriend. When my future boyfriend came into the room and asked if I was all right, I said, “Yeah, I’m fine. We can talk later,” and essentially shoved him right back out the door with a smile pasted on my face.
“Don’t do that to him,” my roommate’s boyfriend told me.
I was confused. “Do what?”
“You know what,” he countered. But I really didn’t. Not at the time, anyway. Later, I sat and thought about it, and I finally got it: my roommate’s boyfriend knew that my poor sap would be badly confused when I acted like everything was fine, then got angry later.
But that’s not what I had meant.
I had meant that I didn’t know what I was feeling, but that it was nothing serious and that when I had worked out my feelings, we could — and should — talk about it. I had to admit, though, that my roommate’s boyfriend probably had a more accurate understanding of how my soon-to-be boyfriend would interpret my words.
It was then that I realized I didn’t want to be in a relationship where we got in petty fights for no reason. So I decided that I wouldn’t lie to my boyfriend. Not even white lies.
It’s easy, and it is often tempting, to ignore the little things that can bother you in a relationship. Relationships of all kinds are always a “pick-your-battle” kind of thing, and it can be easy to want to put some things on the back burner.
But the thing about back burners is that they do get hot… and cause things to boil over eventually.
The biggest white lie that I will never tell my boyfriend is that things are okay when they are not. I won’t say “it’s fine” or “we can talk later” if I don’t mean it. If I don’t want to talk about something at a certain point in time, I will acknowledge it, but I will also be clear if I would like to talk about it at some point in the future.
In the same way, if there is something I need to talk about, no matter how uncomfortable it makes him or me, I will insist upon it. When I get bothered by how his roommate treats him, we talk about it. When he acts strangely around the friends I’m hanging out with, we talk about it.
I also won’t tell my boyfriend that I like something if I don’t. I don’t like plain cheese pizza, and I’m going to tell him that, because otherwise I could end up living the rest of my life only getting cheese pizza when in reality, I love toppings. And I’m going to tell him that I would rather watch “Inside Out” than “Jurassic World” in theaters. It’s important that my boyfriend knows who the authentic “me” is.
White lies only help a relationship in a couple of situations: surprises and presents. You never want to ruin a surprise, and getting a crappy-yet-heartfelt gift isn’t going to end your relationship, so it’s okay to be polite and act like you like it. You can always gently guide your significant other in the future.
Little things shouldn’t break a good relationship; talking about them should only make a relationship stronger. And if you’re pretty sure it would ruin your relationship, then it probably isn’t a little thing. It’s probably a big thing, in which case, pretending it doesn’t exist isn’t a white lie. It’s a real lie.
I believe in being honest and in communicating — but also in being kind and going into conversations with good intentions. My honesty doesn’t help if I go about it in a rude way. I never want my boyfriend’s feelings to be hurt because of bluntness, and though I can’t always promise that I won’t hurt my boyfriend, I can promise that my avoidance of white lies is to help and not to hurt.
Oh, and that night, I texted my soon-to-be boyfriend and I articulated myself much better. I told him that it wasn’t anything serious, but it was something I would want to talk about eventually. Spoiler alert: it all worked out.
