Lying — Part 06/17
Chapter 5 — Lying in Interpersonal Relationships
“Trust is not an abstraction: it is a fabric woven day by day, word by word, gesture by gesture — and it can be torn by a single false word.”
From the fragility of trust to the depth of betrayal: an exploration of how lying damages the most intimate bonds — family, friendship, and love — and whether broken trust can ever be rebuilt.
In the previous chapter, we followed lying into its most intimate refuge — the inner life of the individual, where it manifests as self-deception, denial, idealization, and rationalization. We saw how lying to oneself compromises consciousness, fragments identity, and multiplies into chains that gradually imprison the liar himself. But lying, as we have already had occasion to observe, is not a solitary phenomenon. It is completed in the encounter with the other — it is in the interpersonal relationship that falsehood finds its recipient, and it is in this encounter that its effects become most visible, most concrete, and, frequently, most painful.
Because it is in relationships — in families, in friendships, in loves, in partnerships of every kind — that trust becomes living matter. Trust is not an abstraction: it is a fabric woven day by day, word by word, gesture by gesture, and it can be torn by a single false word. Lying in interpersonal relationships is not merely an abstract moral violation: it is a concrete aggression against something that was built with time, with care, with mutual exposure. That is why the betrayal of trust — when discovered — hurts so much: because what is lost is not only the credibility of a statement, but the security of a presence.
I. Trust as the foundation of coexistence
Before examining lying in relationships, it is necessary to pause on what it damages: trust. Trust is, we might say, the air that human relationships breathe — invisible, indispensable, and powerfully noticed only when it is lacking.
We live surrounded by trust. We leave home trusting that drivers will respect the red light. We entrust our bodies to a surgeon trusting that he has been honest about its risks. We deposit our money in an institution trusting that it will return it when requested. We tell a secret to a friend trusting that he will keep it. In all these cases, trust is not a certainty: it is a bet — an act of faith, so to speak, in the word, the competence, or the integrity of the other. And it is precisely this dimension of a bet that makes trust so valuable and so vulnerable: because to trust is to risk, and whoever trusts and is betrayed not only loses the bet — they lose the disposition to bet again.
Trust in interpersonal relationships has a particular nature. Different from the trust we place in impersonal systems — the bank, the hospital, the State — trust in personal relationships is built from shared experiences, revealed vulnerabilities, and kept promises. It is, therefore, deeper and more fragile than institutional trust. When a bank deceives us, we feel indignation; when a friend deceives us, we feel a wound. The difference is not merely one of degree — it is one of nature. Because in the interpersonal relationship, trust is not only functional: it is affective. It involves not only the expectation that the other will act in a certain way, but the belief that the other knows us, respects us, and values us enough not to falsify us.
It is in this context that lying acquires its most painful weight. When someone we trusted lies to us, the immediate damage is not the falsehood itself — it is the shaking of our capacity to trust. The betrayed person not only discovers that a certain statement was false: they discover that their trust was exploited, that their vulnerability was used against them, that what they considered safe was illusory. And this shaking, once suffered, is not easily repaired. Lost trust is like lost innocence: one can rebuild something in its place, but it will never be identical to what was there before.
II. Lying and affection: when lying destroys bonds
The deepest human relationships — those involving love, friendship, familiarity — are, paradoxically, the most vulnerable to lying. Not because they are weaker, but because they are more exposed. The more intimate a relationship is, the greater the quantity of oneself that is handed over to the other — and, therefore, the greater the surface that can be wounded. Lying between strangers is an inconvenience; lying between people who love each other is a catastrophe.
Affection — the disposition to care for the other, to want their good, to share their life — is the substance of deep relationships. And affection, to develop, needs a terrain that only truth can provide: the terrain of genuine mutual knowledge. When I love someone, I want to be known by that someone — not the embellished version, not the facade, not the character I created to please, but the real person, with their qualities and defects, with their strengths and fragilities. And I want to know, reciprocally, the real person — not the idealization, not the projection, not the fantasy. Truth is, in this sense, the food of genuine affection. Without it, affection feeds on illusion — and affection fed on illusion, however intense it may be, is fragile: it is one true piece of data away from collapsing.
Lying corrodes this terrain. When I discover that someone I love lied to me — not about a trivial detail, but about something that matters, something that affects my perception of that person and of our relationship — what is shaken is not only my trust in that specific statement: it is my trust in the entire relationship. Because if they lied to me about this, what else could be false? What other truths were hidden? What other promises were empty? Lying, once discovered, casts a retrospective light over the entire shared history — and this light reveals, with cruelty, that what we considered solid may have been built on sand.
It is important to note that this destruction does not depend on the objective gravity of the lie. A relatively small lie — an omission, a half-truth, a fabricated detail — can cause a shaking disproportionate to its factual dimension, because what is at stake is not the content of the lie, but the act of lying. The question the betrayed person asks themselves is not “what was hidden?”, but “why did they hide it from me?” And this question, unlike the first, does not find an answer in factuality — it is found in the terrain of meaning, intention, and respect. Because lying to someone is, at bottom, an implicit declaration: “I do not trust you enough to tell you the truth,” or “I judge that you are not capable of bearing reality,” or “I prefer my comfort to our relationship.” Whatever the implicit message, it is a wound — and the wound, when it is located in affection, heals slowly and leaves a scar.
III. Lying in families, friendships, and love
The family — the first school of coexistence, the first laboratory of trust, and the first battlefield of truth — is, perhaps, the terrain where lying causes its most lasting effects. And this is for a simple reason: in the family, relationships are not chosen. We do not choose our parents, our siblings, our children. We are bound to one another by ties we cannot untie — and this inevitability confers upon family lying a specific weight: there is no option to simply leave, to start over with another interlocutor, to forget and move on. Lying in the family remains — like a foreign body in the tissue of relationships — and needs to be, sooner or later, faced.
Family secrets are one of the most common and corrosive forms of lying in the domestic sphere. Hidden paternity, unmentioned illness, the past swept under the rug, the history rewritten for the children. These secrets rarely arise from malice: they arise, most of the time, from the desire to protect — to protect children from truths they are judged unable to bear, to protect the family from external judgments, to protect oneself from shame. But protection has a price, and this price is always paid with interest: because secrets, sooner or later, come to light — and when they do, the damage is always greater than the truth told at the right time would have been. The child who discovers, in adulthood, that their family history was a fabrication, not only deals with the shock of the discovery: they deal with the perception that they lived in a lie, that the people they trusted most chose to deceive them, and that their own identity — built upon narratives that turn out to be false — needs to be remade.
In friendships, lying operates differently, but no less harmfully. Friendship, unlike family, is a chosen relationship — and it is precisely this voluntariness that confers upon friendly trust a particularly precious character. When I say to a friend “I trust you,” I am saying something I cannot say to a relative out of mere duty: I am saying that I choose, freely and voluntarily, to deposit in you something of value. Lying, in this context, not only betrays trust: it betrays the choice. The betrayed friend not only loses trust in the one who deceived them — they lose, to a certain extent, trust in their own capacity to choose well. “If I was wrong about him, what else could I be wrong about?”
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In romantic love, lying takes on even more intense — and more complex — contours. Love, by its very nature, involves a reciprocal exposure unparalleled in any other form of relationship: whoever loves surrenders, shows themselves, lays themselves bare in a way they would with no one else. And it is precisely this surrender that makes lying in love so devastating: because what is betrayed is not only the trust of just any interlocutor, but the trust of someone who surrendered — who showed themselves vulnerable, who offered themselves without reserve.
Lying in love takes various forms. There is lying about the past — the secrets kept to avoid revealing a history one fears the other will not accept. There is lying about the present — the daily truths omitted to keep the peace, the dissatisfactions silenced to avoid conflicts, the encounters and meetings hidden. There is lying about oneself — the persona built to be more attractive, more interesting, more deserving of the other’s love. And there is, finally, lying by omission — the silence about what matters, the reserve about what should be shared, the retreat from the truth that could strengthen the relationship, but which demands a courage the liar, at that moment, does not possess.
In all these cases, the mechanics are similar: lying creates a distance — a shadow zone between two people who should, in principle, be closer to each other than to anyone else in the world. And this distance, the longer it lasts, the more difficult it becomes to cross. The couple that, over the years, accumulates omissions, half-truths, and significant silences may reach a point where both, although sharing the same table and the same bed, inhabit distinct realities — each with their version of the common history, each with their narrative, each with their secrets. And the saddest thing is that, often, this distance is felt as a lack of connection, as a cooling of love, as a mysterious longing for what is gone — when in truth it is the cumulative effect of all the truths that were not spoken.
IV. Silence and omission as forms of lying
In Chapter 1, we distinguished lying proper from omission — and we saw that the boundary between the two is, frequently, difficult to draw. In the terrain of interpersonal relationships, this difficulty becomes even more acute, because it is in this terrain that omission finds its most seductive justifications and its most corrosive effects.
Silence, in relationships, is not neutral. Keeping silent can be prudent, it can be respectful, it can be necessary — but it can also be a form of falsehood. The question is not whether silence is always lying — it is not — but under what circumstances silence becomes a betrayal of trust. And the answer depends, fundamentally, on three factors: what is silenced, why it is silenced, and to whom it is silenced.
The first factor is content. Not all silence is omissive: there are things that do not need to be said, details that do not matter, intimate thoughts that have no reason to be shared. The right to privacy is legitimate, and no one is obliged to make transparent every thought, every feeling, every experience. Omission becomes problematic when it falls upon something the other has a reasonable interest in knowing — when it affects decisions the other needs to make, when it compromises the image the other has of the relationship, when it violates tacit or explicit agreements of loyalty and transparency.
The second factor is motivation. To omit out of prudence — because the moment is not adequate, because the other is not in a condition to receive the truth, because one seeks a better opportunity to communicate — is very different from omitting out of convenience — because one fears the other’s reaction, because one wants to avoid a conflict, because one protects one’s own comfort. Prudence aims at the good of the other; convenience aims at the good of the liar. And although the distinction is not always clear — because human motivations are rarely pure — the question “why am I keeping silent?” is one of the most important one can ask in a relationship.
The third factor is the recipient. To omit information from a work colleague is one thing; to omit it from a spouse, another. The degree of intimacy, commitment, and mutual exposure that exists in a relationship determines what can reasonably be silenced and what must necessarily be revealed. In intimacy, silence about what matters is almost always a form of distancing — a refusal to share, a door that closes, a concession to loneliness within companionship.
There is, moreover, a particularly insidious form of omission in relationships that deserves mention: affective omission. It is not about silencing facts or information, but about silencing feelings. The spouse who never says “I love you” — not because they do not feel it, but because they fear exposure. The father who never expresses admiration for his son — not because he does not admire him, but because his upbringing taught him to withhold praise. The friend who never says “you hurt me” — not because they are not hurt, but because they fear that frankness will destroy the relationship. These affective omissions, although they do not constitute lies in the strict sense, produce similar effects: they create distances, fuel misunderstandings, leave wounds that are not treated because they are not recognized. And many relationships that fall apart — for lack of communication, for gradual cooling, for mysterious distancing — do not fall apart because of what was said, but because of what was left unsaid.
V. Wounded trust: is it possible to rebuild it?
A question imposes itself at the end of this chapter: when trust is wounded — when the lie is discovered, when the omission comes to light, when the distance created by falsehood becomes visible — is it possible to rebuild it?
The honest answer is: it depends. It depends on the depth of the wound, on the disposition of the parties involved, on the context in which the lie occurred, and, above all, on the honesty with which the episode is faced. Because the rebuilding of trust is not an instantaneous act — it is a long, painful, and uncertain process, which demands from both parties a disposition that is not always available.
The first step, evidently, is recognition. Not superficial recognition — the “sorry, I was wrong” said in passing to appease the other’s reaction — but deep recognition: admitting what was done, understanding why it was done, accepting the consequences without minimizing or deflecting them. This recognition is, in general, the hardest part, because it demands from the liar what their original lie aimed to avoid: facing the truth — about what they did, about why they did it, about what it caused.
The second step is reparation — not only verbal, but practical. Words of repentance, however sincere they may be, are not enough if they are not accompanied by an effective change in behavior. Trust is not rebuilt with promises: it is rebuilt with consistent action over time. Every true word, every gesture of transparency, every occasion in which the liar chooses truth over comfort — all this contributes, gradually, to the rebuilding of what was damaged. But the process is slow, and patience is an indispensable virtue — both for those who try to win back trust and for those who try to rebuild it.
The third — and perhaps the most important — is the acceptance that rebuilt trust will never be identical to the original trust. Just as a fractured bone can heal and function again, but will always bear the mark of the fracture, betrayed trust can be rebuilt, but it will always bear the memory of the betrayal. This does not mean that rebuilding is useless — quite the contrary. It simply means that one must be realistic about what can be recovered and what is lost forever. And that the best way to honor trust is not to rebuild it after it is betrayed, but to preserve it before the betrayal occurs — through the daily, modest, and perseverant practice of truth.
A note to the reader
This book is not for sale. It is being published in full, chapter by chapter, free of charge.
Truth, by its very nature, cannot be fenced in by walls of ownership. If these pages do you good, the only currency I ask in return is that you pass them on — discuss them with a friend, question them, or use them to illuminate some shadow in your own life.
A new chapter will be published every Sunday. The complete book, in PDF format, will be available for free download at the end of the series.
Printed editions will be available for purchase in Brazil and internationally, as printing and distribution involve costs.
— Wilson Vasconcellos da Silva
