12

An Alternative Christmas

Did you feel that? That release of pressure? Do you know why that happened? That’s called the power of honesty. I might have mentioned before how important honesty is to you. More so, I think, than to many others. Some people can live happily and cheat. Who are those people? Not you, at any rate. You might even say that this is why polyamory suits you so well. Since you are able to attract and connect with many people, and since you do not deal well with dishonesty, polyamory and you fit together. You can be open about the life you want to live.

There were certain things back then that made it hard for you to be honest. All that fear of rejection, for one. All that societal shaming, for another. It might be surprising for you to learn this, because after all in your childhood you lied your ass off, but you now cannot live happily without honesty.

Let me tell you a little bit about lying. You might think it will protect you from further repercussions, exposure…you might even feel that it is a necessary evil. That it will get you in with the “in-crowd” — even though it never did, did it? You might even feel that a certain level of lying is acceptable and laudable. But more than the disillusionment and disappointment that lying creates when it is discovered, lying creates more stress for you. Yes, you.

There’s something called “cognitive dissonance.” You will discover what it is when you are thirty-nine. Funny it took you that long to find a name for something you’ve been living with most of your life. Cognitive dissonance is when the picture you see of the outside world or the events you describe don’t match up with your internal reality. It creates a splintered world, two parallel universes that your mind is forever trying to reconcile. All lying does this, even white lies. As your mind tries to reconcile two disparate realities, you experience stress.

Stress is a killer: all that adrenaline and cortisol rushing round your system, preventing other bodily functions from working properly, putting you in a constant state of anxiety. Some people can deal with stress remarkably well. Others just think they do. You, who have been lied to all your life, cannot. Stress also prevents your mind from making decisions in your long-term best interest, because all you want to do is escape the situation your lies have created. That means flight…which eventually happened.

So here is, at last, one of the real reasons why monogamy is not for you. You could, of course, live as monogamous and continue to be attracted to people with whom you could not connect without cheating. You could repress all those desires and live a lie. But that seems to be a very stressful way of life, doesn’t it?

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Lying creates stress, which pushes you away from rationality and into destructive decisions. The truth might hurt, but lying will eventually kill you. Don’t do it if you want to live a full and happy life.