“I’d rather lose you than lie to you.” As a person who betrayed your wife’s trust, this must be your mantra. A shift must occur in your paradigm of honesty that puts the truth in a place of utmost importance and highest priority. Chances are that more than one area of your life is permeated by a lack of honesty and integrity. But with this shift to prioritize honesty, every area of your life will be impacted by your relentless pursuit of the truth. And your wife must see this shift if trust is to be rebuilt between the two of you.
We tend to be a little fickle with honesty. What do you say when your wife asks, “Does this make me look fat?” or “How does this look on me?”
“Uh … um … you look … uh … it’s kinda … well …”
Sound familiar? The last thing you want to do is hurt her feelings, so a little white lie is okay in this case, right? If so, then where is the line that separates little white lies from not so little lies anymore? Does Jesus make provisions for little lies? Is there room for skewing the truth? Even just a little? What do you think?
I’d say the answer is no.
If your target is building trust, and your commitment is steadfast to that end, then white lies are off the table. Period. In any situation. If your wife catches you in a white lie, she will likely extrapolate that to the whole of your life. She’ll think that a little lie here equals big lies there.
If you’ll lie about being a few minutes late to dinner, you’ll probably lie about looking at porn again. If you can’t tell the truth about what route you took home from work, then you probably won’t tell the truth about contacting your mistress again. If you can’t be honest about how much money you spent on a new tool, then it wouldn’t be a stretch for you to lie about your whereabouts last Friday night.
Further, if you’ve been busted in your struggle or addiction, you probably lied about it in some form or fashion along the way. You lied about the severity of it or the intensity or the duration or the time line or maybe the people involved. The extrapolation your wife makes is justified.
Although it may frustrate you, try not to be offended if your wife expands something that seems like a minor omission or a nuance of the truth into something much larger. She is merely expressing her hurt, not attempting to indict you for a crime you did not commit. Realize that her pain is intense because you have committed other grave crimes. She’s trying to communicate her pain to you.
“I’d rather lose you than lie to you” means that you plan to work with her in truth at all costs, even when it hurts. Even when you know it’s not what she wants to hear. Even when the outcome doesn’t make sense.
Here are a couple of examples of how this works in my house. Recently, Shelley was preparing for a speaking engagement and inviting my feedback on her wardrobe. She asked the ever daunting Catch-22 question “How does this look?”
Everything in me wanted to answer, “Great, looks great. You should wear that if it makes you comfortable.” But that’s not what I was thinking. I thought her outfit looked like something my grandmother would wear. The reality is that it would’ve been a lie to avoid the truth. At the very least it would have been an inauthentic response.
So I said, “That sweater looks kind of grandma-ish.”
She bustled away, mumbling, “I don’t know why I even ask you!”
I didn’t know why she had asked me either if she didn’t want the truth. But I’d rather lose her than lie to her. So, to the best of my ability, I’ll tell the truth in all things—and take my lumps.
Then there was the time Shelley asked me to ask our electrician a specific question. I talked to him later that day and asked him a bunch of my own questions but forgot to ask hers. When I returned home and she probed about her question, I hemmed and hawed and guessed the right answer based on my conversation with the electrician. She accepted my confusing response, but I could see it didn’t sit well with her. And I knew in my gut I was lying. So I told her, “I forgot to ask.” I had to call him to get an answer to her question.
Unfortunately, with her disappointment a likely result, it is sometimes easier to make something up and lie than tell the truth. And since we’re dealing in truth, here’s what I know to be truth in my life: if I start lying about small things, it’s only a matter of time before I start lying about big things. That’s dangerous. That’s unsafe. That’s untrustworthy.
This last example is a good segue into an area that needs to be addressed specifically when it comes to truth telling: withholding. If you withhold information, you lie. Let me say that a different way: when you choose not to disclose pertinent information, you aren’t telling the truth.
Some people will try to dance around this and manipulate a situation for their protection and benefit. They’ll convince themselves that not sharing information means not lying about it. “If I don’t tell her about it, then I’m not lying about it.” Wrong! And untruthful. If there is material information (a technical term used during my days as an accountant and consultant) related to a situation, and you decide not to disclose it, you’re guilty of misleading your client. What is material? Pretty much everything.
For example, let’s say that you struggle with Internet pornography. You’ve accessed it at work a few times, but you do this mostly at home. Your wife busts you, then demands to know how big this issue is. You tell her about every instance you can remember of accessing porn at home—but withhold the part about doing it at work. You’ve just lied. Whether you accidentally left that part out or not, in her eyes, you just lied. And trust is further from being rebuilt.
Perhaps we should define material as any information that if left undisclosed now but discovered later would cause pain, discouragement, and distrust in your spouse. Does that cover it? If you’re like I was in the beginning of my restoration with Shelley, you understand this new definition of lying to be way broader than any you would have chosen yourself.
Another thing you need to know about honesty is just how big the impact of lying is. I cannot tell you how many wives have relayed to me their disappointment and discouragement with lying. It’s even bigger than acting out. Wives will often say they can forgive and get past the acting out again, but they really struggle with and often cannot get past the lies and secrets. In fact, I have talked to very few wives who say they would absolutely divorce over another slip or relapse of sexual integrity. They can somehow muster the grace to move past it, assuming their husband is genuinely working on making things better. Alternatively, they repeatedly say that they will not tolerate another lie. Period. End of story.
If you are to build trust and win your wife back, you cannot afford to lie.
In a recent counseling session, a wife discovered that her husband had contacted a former girlfriend on Facebook. He had disclosed multiple affairs to his wife, many of which began on Facebook. (I’ll address social media a little later.) The wife knew he was doing it again.
When she confronted him, he lied and she dropped the hammer. She told me she would have worked with him to take the necessary steps to reconcile after another affair, but because of his lying, she was done. She filed divorce papers a few weeks later.
You might lose your wife by telling her the truth, but at least there is a chance to salvage the relationship. What I mean is that your wife may ultimately choose to leave based on how you have wronged her and violated your marriage vows. You cannot control that. It is her choice. Alternatively, you put the final nails into your own coffin when you lie.
I’d rather lose you than lie to you.
This concept is certainly nothing new or novel, but it requires clarification for many men. Passive truth telling means there is a willingness to be honest about something when specific questions are asked. Active truth telling means being honest before being questioned. Taking it a step further, it means anticipating questions that might be asked and answering them ahead of time.
At this point, a lot of guys will say, “You want me to be a mind reader?”
No, that is not what I am suggesting. What I am proposing is that you treat your wife like a partner, not a baby-sitter. As a colaborer in the business of life rather than a parent. It is important to get out of your self-centered way of thinking and walk a few steps in your spouse’s shoes. Take a few minutes to consider what she might need to know, might be anxious about, might doubt you on, or perhaps what she could be fearful of.
Your wife needs access to all bank and credit card accounts so she can see what is happening at any given time. (This will be covered more thoroughly in chapter 18.) Open access is a good thing, and a husband who is willing to grant access to all his accounts demonstrates transparency. However, this is still a passive form of truth telling. He is passively allowing his wife to check up on him when she wants to. He doesn’t have to do anything but wait. She has to be the active participant.
Too many wives tell me they feel like they are thrust into a private investigator role and must dig to find the truth. Or worse, they feel as though they are baby-sitters, having to make sure the child they care for hasn’t left behind a mess for them to clean up. Active truth telling relieves them of this burden.
When a husband becomes an active participant or active truth teller, he relieves his wife of the responsibility of checking up on him. Being an active truth teller means not only granting access to the accounts but also proactively initiating the review of the accounts. He would suggest he download the week’s transactions on Friday afternoon and sit down with his wife that night and explain each item line by line if she wants him to.
The conversation might sound like this: “Honey, I want to build trust with you in the area of our finances. I don’t want you to feel like a baby-sitter or a private investigator. And I don’t want you to feel like there is something not clear about our finances and how I’m spending our money. To that end, here are the usernames and passwords to all of our and my accounts. (Give her a piece of paper with everything written out.) Further, I’d like to sit down with you at the end of each week and go over them line by line and explain what they are. If you have any questions, you can ask me. Once we’re done, you can rest knowing that each week’s spending is in the light. So on Friday, when I get home from work, I’ll download and print out each record for the week. Anything I can’t explain immediately, I’ll research and get back to you within twenty-four hours. Would you be willing to do this with me?”
The objective is not to painstakingly detail your every movement and dollar spent (although that might be a by-product of this exercise), but rather to proactively live your life in the light, taking responsibility for righting any wrongs and displaying a contrite initiative that speaks louder than your past actions.
Here’s another example of active versus passive truth telling. Say a man’s issue has been accessing Internet pornography after his wife has gone to bed. What would be passive and what would be active truth telling? Passive truth telling might look like slapping X3watch on your laptop and calling it good. If there is an issue, she’ll know and say something. Then you can explain it.
Hopefully there won’t be an issue, right? Wrong. There will be. And a Lego or two of trust will be destroyed.
Active truth telling in this case has a couple of components. First, if you’ve installed an Internet filter and monitoring software, you need to know that they are imperfect. There will be false positives and negatives. Some things will show up on a report that look like integrity violations but actually aren’t, and some things that look sketchy in your Internet history will be left out of the report. It’s the nature of the beast.
You can actively tell the truth by beating the report at reporting your activities. Much like the money example above, proactively reviewing Internet travels and history prior to receiving a monitoring report would be very helpful.
As a side note, do you know how much anxiety some wives experience before they receive the accountability report? There can be anticipatory anxiety, waiting for that day every week or two when the accountability report comes, that is so strong it can be debilitating. Some wives dread waiting for the next time they find out their husband cheated on them—again.
That’s what it feels like. Getting her heart stomped on over and over.
Active truth telling includes identifying patterns of acting-out behavior and communicating about corrective behaviors. In this case, the acting out occurs late at night, after the wife has gone to bed—this is the pattern.
Correcting that could include a boundary of not being online after your spouse has turned in or simply going to bed at the same time. In either event, the anomaly can be proactively explained—and possibly even preempted—so as to ease your wife’s mind.
Again, she shouldn’t have to ask, “What did you do after I went to bed?” Instead, a proactive truth teller would initiate the conversation with something like, “I just want you to know what I did last night after you went to bed. I don’t want you to have to ask about it or be nervous about it. I closed my computer at 9:15 after having finished my document for work today. Here’s the laptop with my history pulled up so you can verify. From 9:15 to 10:00 I watched the rest of The Office. From 10 to 10:15 I watched the news on channel 7. From 10:15 to 10:30 I shaved, brushed, flossed, used the bathroom, then hopped in bed.”
Can you see the parts of the conversation that are meaningful? There are details, clarity, and very little room for discrepancy. When you beat your wife to the punch, preempting her questions, you build trust. That doesn’t mean she won’t have some questions of her own based on what you’ve shared. That’s fine, because it’s intimacy then.
The important point is that you spoke up to put her mind at ease. There is so much mileage to be gained in active truth telling. It relieves a wife of any need to investigate or interrogate. It can be a tangible change she sees in you that she can objectively say is different. That builds trust.
You can no longer live in any gray areas where there’s room to misinterpret any of your actions or words. It is worth mentioning here that there’s a distinct difference in the preciseness of recollection between wives and husbands. Many detail-oriented wives are married to generality-driven husbands. As it pertains to trust building, preciseness is critical.
For example, if the current time is 1:43 p.m. and your wife asks you what time it is, what would you say? Would you say the time is a quarter of two, two-ish, about two o’clock, or about twenty till two? If so, you’re dealing in gray areas. You might be perceived as not telling the truth. When it’s generalities versus details, preciseness must prevail. The time is 1:43 p.m.!
If you spent $7.59 on your lunch, and your wife asks how much it cost, how would you respond? Eight bucks? Seven fifty?
Gray area. Potential lie.
Now you may push back on this and say that kind of exactness is a little over the top, but if you’re trying to build trust, you can’t afford to be anything other than over the top. Maybe your wife isn’t that detail oriented, so you think that being exact to the penny or minute wouldn’t be that meaningful for her. To the contrary, I can assure you that the effort you put into being that precise will certainly be noticed.
Every place you can do something to communicate your intention, your commitment, and your heart for honesty will be another Lego placed on the sculpture of your restored relationship.
There are many reasons men deal in gray areas. For some, it involves a fear of failure. In a simple but powerful way, there is a sense of failure in saying you’ll be home in fifteen minutes but it ends up taking seventeen minutes. Some men just don’t want to be wrong, especially if a wife’s hopes or expectations are hanging on him being right.
Other men who dabble in gray areas are responding to feelings of impotence and being controlled. They view their wife’s questions about details as an interrogation and an attempt to control their every move. The truth is, it may be just that! But now is not the time to react and rebel against it, and you don’t have a leg to stand on if you’ve violated her trust.
Let me reiterate the point: deal in the details, because they’re the currency of trust building. Your willingness to get specific, be detail oriented, and work in black and white fosters an environment where trust can thrive.
INSIGHT FROM STEPHEN ARTERBURN
Watch Out for Overconfidence
There are several missteps you can make in recovery, and the biggest one is getting to that point where you think you have it made—you are beyond the basic practices that brought you hope and progress in the first place. I am sure you are familiar with people with bipolar disorder who need medication to function normally. They take the medication and feel so much better that they start to think they no longer need the medication. Rather than being glad the medication has allowed them to experience an amazing turnaround, they want to turn their backs on it. The result is predictable. They revert back to their old patterns and behaviors until they get so bad they are convinced that medication is not optional. Do yourself a favor and view your recovery in that same way.
In addition to not convincing yourself that you are strong enough to get better on your own, don’t convince yourself that you don’t now or never will need additional counseling. In other words, as helpful as this book can be, you may need some additional help.
Rather than trying to eliminate things, look at what you can do to secure and strengthen your progress. All of us need additional wisdom from others, which may include formal counseling. Don’t be shocked if you find that from time to time you are in need of additional help to fix some things or to grow deeper and stronger in your recovery.
If your wife knows that you will get help on your own when you sense you need it, she will trust you even more! Some people even come back through the Every Man’s Battle Workshop again. Better to do it to prevent a relapse than to do it after a relapse—and have your wife’s trust shattered again.
Stay on top of your temptations and be ready to respond with actions rather than complacency.