real life

'You're too good for him' & 8 other lies you tell dating friends.

 

 

 

 

by RICK MORTON

Laughably, my friends have long treated me as some sort of relationship Oracle. This is strange because I have zero to no experience in the field. It’s like going to Chuck Norris for advice in diplomacy. And yet, here we are.

But maybe they beat a path to my door because I always told them what they wanted to hear. I nodded sagely, counseled appropriately and lied through my desperate teeth because I didn’t have the heart to analyse their frequent and consistent shortcomings and tell them the bald truth about their relationship or why he left them.

(The answer, almost always, had something to do with their penchant for clingy obsessiveness and flair for melodrama).

But I’m about to reveal the lies I told. I need to atone for the sins of my past by dismantling the house of mistruth I built to ward off unscheduled bouts of crying. So here we go.

1. “He hasn’t returned your call because he’s probably off visiting a sick relative in Peru.”

I lied. He doesn’t know anyone in Peru, probably couldn’t find it on a map and hasn’t called you because he’s met another woman called Chanice.

2. “No, he is definitely not gay.”

He is gay-er than a fedora filled with poodles. Sorry.

3. “Of course he’s not lying to you about his night out.”

And maybe he’s not. Maybe he was just standing there on a street corner and they built the strip club around him and maybe he was trapped. Maybe.

4. “No, he’s not boring at all!”

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But once he was talking and then an elephant collapsed from boredom 1000 yards away.

5. “He’s probably just waiting for the right moment to propose, he wants it to be perfect.”

I’ve seen glaciers that move faster than him. Perfect? Sure. If your idea of the perfect proposal is finding a ring hidden in a meat pie.

6. “I’m certain he’d have children with you.”

And by ‘children’ I mean ‘adopt a puppy called Boris that will grow to be the size of a small horse’. But you win some and you lose some, right?

7. “He didn’t stay because you were too amazing and too great for him.”

Well, no, sorry. He didn’t stay because you wore him down like a graphite pencil in a 12 hour exam.

8. “I know he never says he loves you, but I’m sure he shows it in his own special way.”

I have literally no evidence this has ever happened and if it does we should write to several university communication experts just to double check it wasn’t a mistake.

9. “You can do better. There are plenty more fish in the sea.”

If you do a simple calculation, assume there are 3.5 billion men in the world. But only 250,000 in your ‘area’. Then subtract the ones whom are just not matches (wrong religion, wrong ideologies, wrong crowd, wrong cereal eating method, wrong sexual orientation etc) and subtract the ones who are already taken and there is really only one person for you. And you just broke up with him.

Oops.

OK, what white lies have you told a friend about their relationship? Or are you always brutally honest?