134. In a conflict with your date do you deal in truth or lies?

Have you noticed that we know intuitively what’s the ‘right’ thing for us to do in our dating relationships? By ‘right’ I don’t mean morally right but what feels peaceful and gives us a sense of ease and serenity. In other words, we know the truth for ourselves.

Spiritual leaders with a clear understanding of life have been teaching for centuries that truth is love. Anything other than truth doesn’t feel peaceful. When we feel most relaxed, at ease and happy it’s pretty easy to know that must be our natural state. So non-truth is obviously not our real nature. When we have conflict in our dating life, however, how many times do we rely on what’s not true in our communication? It’s fairly common to say things that are cutting or hurtful that aren’t true. There’s no love in that, and we know it inside because immediately we feel tight and stressed. It’s pretty simple to see that in such situations not telling the truth doesn’t work for us.

Yet because we somehow have learned that hurting someone or putting them down will make us feel better, we tell lies that we know aren’t true for us. We might say things such as, “You’re the sorriest excuse for a man I’ve ever seen” or “You never communicate honestly.” Or we might throw in some real zingers such as, “I can’t stand you” or “Why don’t you just leave since you’re always flirting with other men?”

When those statements aren’t true do we really feel better? Investigation usually reveals we don’t. We feel miserable. Our habit of lashing out in anger over our hurt feelings isn’t dealing in truth. Truth might be to tell our partner that we’re feeling hurt right now. Not to make our partner responsible for our hurt but just to acknowledge the truth.

Then, if we want, we can investigate the thoughts that led to our hurt feelings and see where we made judgments – where we hold interpretations or opinions that caused us to hurt. Our emotional hurt is always about us. It’s never about the other person. When we realize our suffering has nothing to do with our partner we can be loving and nonjudgmental toward them. We don’t need to say and do hurtful, unkind things. The result is we havent added to our pain by telling lies, and we haven’t damaged the relationship.

Copyright © 2006 Chuck Custer