Marriage Series: Discussions and Decisions to Have After Your First Argument – Impeccable Honesty

Thinking of marriage as a game can make marriage sound a bit inconsequential, when for most married people, marriage is one of the most important parts of their lives.  However, it can be helpful to view very serious situations as a game.  In fact, applying the science of Game Theory in order to prevail, war is often treated as a game.  Marriage can be a game that both spouses want to, and can, win.

What marriage and games have in common is that in order to play well, there are rules and there are skills.  When both spouses play by the rules and have the requisite skills, they can have a successful and rewarding marriage.

However, even successful marriages have struggles.  It is hard enough to be roommates, but add to that:  sharing money, responsibilities (e.g., producing income), raising children, managing extended families and forming and maintaining intimacy, and there are a lot of ups and downs.  As we wrote in the first blog in this series, the challenge in a marriage is to resolve disagreements that arise from normal differences between spouses- especially doing it well.

Impeccable honesty is the only way to be clear on what the difference is that needs to be resolved.

Rules. Rules are essential to this task. Perhaps the most important rule is for the spouses to develop the reputation with one another of being impeccably honest.  “Impeccably,” means more than simply telling the truth.  It means telling the complete truth.  It means never giving something “spin” or a partial truth to avoid dealing with an uncomfortable detail.  For example, if arriving late, rather than saying, “There was a lot of traffic,” impeccable honesty means saying, “I finished up a project but did not leave on time.”  Rather than saying, “You look great,” it means saying, “That shirt really does not look good on you.”  Rather than saying, “Ihad lunch with Mark.  He has become a good friend,” it means saying, “I am getting a bit of a crush on Mark.”

Honesty.  Impeccable honesty might or might not be a moral issue, but it is a very practical one. Resolving differences with a plan that works for both spouses is only possible if both spouses have a clear understanding of what the difference or problem is.  The only way for that to happen is to have impeccable honesty.

There is another significant advantage, i.e., a two sided coin, to impeccable honesty.

• One side of the coin is that most people can get away with a lie or two, but no one can get away with a pattern of dishonesty. Human survival for hundreds of thousands of years depended on having really good built in lie-detectors.  When someone lies to us the first time, we feel a little suspicious, but usually give the benefit of the doubt.  However, we pick up on a pattern of dishonesty easily.  Once a spouse has the reputation of dishonesty, there is no way to have a truly successful marriage.  There is no way to solve disagreements because dishonesty hides important information needed for solutions.
• The other side of the coin has to do with the person being dishonest. Dishonesty, in any form, is always selfish.  It is impossible to care about another person and lie to them at the same time.  We can hear those of you, reading this, protesting what we just said.  For example, “What if you are telling a child a lie about their health condition so that they don’t worry?”  First of all, they can tell, if only unconsciously, that you are lying, and having no reliable information makes them more anxious, not less anxious.  Even if they believe you at the moment, they soon learn that what you told them was not true and that you are not to be trusted.  And if you still do not believe us, there is good research that shows that children do better medically if they are told the very hard truths about their condition, right from the beginning.  Impeccable honesty builds trust.  Trust is essential to a successful marriage.

            To lie to a child under the guise of being kind is also a lie to yourself too.  You are protecting yourself from your own anxiety.  The same is true with a spouse.  Selfishness in the form of dishonesty is a thorn in the side of any marriage.

There is another significant advantage to impeccable honesty. In our earlier example, when the wife tells the husband that she is getting a crush on Mark, she has opened the door to what could be a very effective discussion.  Spouses with a reputation for impeccable honesty never have a built-in gap in their understanding of what is going on in their marriage.  They never have to deal with anxious distrust.  Therefore, when differences come up, and before they grow into major problems, having honest discussions makes it much easier to resolve any disagreement.

There are other rules necessary to play the game of marriage well, but impeccable honesty is by far the most important one.  We will touch on other rules in future blogs.  For more details, you might consider ordering our book, The Road to Marital Success is Unpaved: Seven Skills for Making Marriage Work.  Links on this website will take you to Amazon and Barnes & Noble to order.