Lying

It’s quite clear we’re a nation of ‘fibbers’, so what do we do; throw our hands in the air and wonder where it all went wrong? Or should we dissect these types of survey results and understand they’re not as bad as you think.

Lies can be hurtful things that wreck lives; if you lie about a partner at home you’re worthy of scorn. If your lies are well calculated and part of a deceitful plan to mislead others, you’ll get no defence from me here. But most of the lies we tell to get dates and while we’re on them don’t fall into these categories. They’re of the ‘white lie’ variety and quite often we don’t realise we’re telling one till it’s slipped out of our mouth. You don’t know me yet, I haven’t had the chance to show you what I’m really like. Sometimes a lie spills out because I’m trying too hard to let you know what makes me special.

Like it or not, dating has become a full-blooded competition. Net dating offers us all a thousand prospective partners; read everyone’s profiles and you’ll see lying – or let’s refer to it as ‘embellishing’ – is a nation-wide affliction. We all have a job we adore, have an incredible network of friends, we love to travel, we reads books by authors no-one’s heard of (are there really no Dan Brown readers out there?) and of course, we all work out at the gym at least four times per week. We just want to make a good first impression, so we both have a chance to genuinely fall in love; is that such a terrible thing? And can you blame us? We live in an era where nothing is quite as it seems, the people we fantasise about on TV and in magazines have been digitally enhanced, so why can’t we be… just a little?

When you discover we lied – or embellished, by then it’s usually laughed off or remembered fondly in best man’s speeches on wedding days. After all, isn’t love meant to be a bit like a fairy tale? So is there any harm in a little make-believe?