Characterizing participation in a porn film as, ‘doing some nude modeling’, IS a lie. No amount of slicing or dicing changes that, I’m afraid. She lied, to avoid an uncomfortable truth. He may have been understanding, if she’d been honest. But we’ll never know because she chose to lie instead.
Regardless of his attitude to porn he def has cause to call off the wedding. I wouldn’t marry someone who purposely mislead me to this degree. And then, when caught in that lie, failed to own it and attempted to equivocated a porn film with nude modeling. For me, it would confirm this person is a liar and, as such, cannot be trusted moving forward.
Everyone has a past, it’s not my right to know every detail, and I could forgive a youthful misstep. But if I catch you in a lie of this magnitude I’m just not going to trust you again.
I don’t think it’s quite this cut and dried. I feel like there’s a category of statements which basically say “I’m going to inform you of the existence of a potential can of worms… and I’m going to deliberately be vague about it, because I’m just as happy that you not know the details”, but which leave up to the other person whether they want to dig deeper.
Things like:
-“My relationship with my first wife was extraordinarily unpleasant. Things got really out of hand, but I’m much better now.”
-“I was a bit of a bad boy after high school, and had some run-ins with the law”
-“I had some substance abuse problems, but I’ve been clean for 20 years now”
In all of those cases, there’s a pretty huge range of activities that could be being described, which I think is pretty clearly implied. You had some substance abuse problems? Did you smoke a bit too much pot? Did you get a DUI? Were you a homeless heroin addict? Any of those could be described in that fashion, and unless the person making the statement evades or lies in response to follow-up questions I don’t automatically condemn the original statement as dishonest.
(Of course, in this hypothetical, we weren’t present for whatever conversation Lindsay and Josh had concerning the “nude modelling”…)
Under no circumstances would I intervene at either person’s request. They are adults. They are in a relationship together. If they want it to work, they are going to need to communicate with each other. If they need help communicating, they should jointly select a neutral therapist who can work with them on their issues. There is no role in this relationship for you to leverage your relationship with one of them to manipulate one or benefit the other.
In this particular case, I wouldn’t intervene for another reason. Josh sounds like an insensitive, judgmental, controlling asshole. Lindsay will do better and be happier without him. Josh has unreasonable expectations and there is no way that Lindsay will be happy satisfying them. Based on the limited information in your post, I’m assuming that breaking up is best for both of them but especially for Lindsay.
I think you’re misinterpreting what I’m saying, which really comes down to the way the information was conveyed, the context of the conversation.
There’s a big difference between:
“Hey, there’s something you need to know about my past”
“What is it”
“Well, after high school, I was desperate for money, and I did some things I wasn’t proud of”
“Such as?”
“Well, I did some some nude modelling…” (trails off meaningfully)
“Hey, let’s just put it behind us.”
vs
“Hey, sweetie, what did you do to earn money after high school”
“Well, I’m not proud of it but I did some, uhh, nude modelling”
“Oh, goodness. But it was just that? Just nude modelling?”
“Yes, just nude modelling”.
To me, the first of those two conversations has a strong subtext of “I did some stuff I’m ashamed of, sex was involved, but if you aren’t going to ask I’m not going to tell you, it’s in the past, we’re both happier leaving it there” (granted, I exaggerated it a bit to make it as clear as possible).
A slightly less wrought exchange might be something like “well, after high school, I had a bad boy phase and had some run-ins with the law”. Expressed like that, I think there’s an implication of some minor hooliganism and maybe a misdemeanor or two. But if what that’s really describing is three years in prison for felony assault, is it a lie to have been vague in that fashion, if it’s definitely in the past now and the speaker has definitely turned their life around?
I don’t have a particularly clear or good answer, I just think you’re being a bit overcertain in the other direction.
Absolutely yes. When you choose your words to lead someone to conclude a false answer you’re lying, plain and simple. If you do this to someone who trusts you, you’re taking advantage of their trust in you to lie. When you dissuade the person from pressing further by making it clear that the topic makes you uncomfortable, you’re compounding the lie by manipulating them through their feelings towards you. People who deliberately feed you false information are simply not trustworthy.
The more people try to defend Lindsay with this kind of, the less charitable I feel towards her. Like I said before, I assumed she lied because the situation was uncomfortable from her when I read the OP, but if she starts trying to argue that she didn’t really lie my opinion of her would drop like a rock.
I have no idea why this bit was included; it doesn’t affect the fact that the statement was a lie, it’s just a justification for lying. The fact that you’re not doing X anymore doesn’t mean that tricking someone into believing you never did X is honest behavior.
If judging people for outright lying to me makes me judgmental, I’d rather take the label than find out what other things they’ll lie to be about in the future. If calling someone out on an outright lie is ‘insensitive’ or ‘controlling’, I’ll choose the label of just letting someone walk all over me.
Well, if my long time SO were to suddenly reveal to me she had been molested and that led to a brief stint in porn. The LAST thing I’d be worried about is the stupid lie she told me. I think I’d be more concerned about her emotional well being.
It seems rather narcissistic to make yourself out to be the victim in this situation.
If I were Josh, I would have been more angry with the rebuffed BF. I’d tell him what he was doing is childish, and that his attempts at causing drama between Lindsay and I have failed miserably.
Heck, the harder question for me would be: “Do I even let Lindsay know about the email I received?”
I probably would, but damn, how to do that and let her know I still love her?
Can’t say that I blame him all that much. If the relationship was serious enough to think about marriage, she should have been up front with him.
Nothing good will come out of this. You need to remain neutral and try to salvage friendships if you can. If you chime in on the situation, I think it will blow up in your face and you will lose both of them. Although I gotta say…Josh sounds like a dick and wouldn’t be that big a loss.
I think a person can be concerned about another person and still angry and lose trust because of a lie. For an example, if someone was a problem drinker and they told their SO that they had stopped drinking but the SO found out that was a lie, the SO could be both worried this person is damaging their health and well-being and angry they were lied to.
Terrible things happen to us, but we’re still responsible for how we honor or abuse other people’s trust.
It seems rather manipulative to slap a DSM label on someone for daring to object to you violating their trust. I think that lying to someone in an attempt to sucker them into getting stuck in a marriage with you, then making yourself out as the victim when your lie is exposed, and attempting to label the actual victim as a narcissist sounds far more like the behavior of someone with an Axis II personality disorder than being angry that someone violated your trust. You don’t seem to value being able to trust your partners, and that’s fine for your choice, but people who feel that honesty and trust are important are not narcissists.
This is a very interesting question, and one that hits close to home for me. I’m a firm believer that people, no matter what their relationship, don’t have to share everything in their past, and sometimes it’s better to leave things unsaid, or understood generally, if not specifically. Being married to someone doesn’t automatically mean you cede your right to keep the past buried, especially if it’s something traumatic or destructive to the relationship.
I’m ashamed of my sexual history, and really preferred that my wife not know the details. She was well aware of my life history in general. One night when we were having a confessional talk about our pasts, she picked and pried out details I hadn’t intended to tell her, and when her reaction was exactly what I had feared it would be, it almost ruined our marriage. I’m seeing a therapist and still dealing with the fallout. I’m committed to our relationship, and feeling better all the time, but it has been a rough year for me.
Some posters are so quick to judge Josh, but learning about an event like that – taking part in a degrading group sex pornographic movie – is not a trivial revelation. That would be a pretty tough pill to swallow, and would bring up all kinds of ancillary questions about what kind of person Lindsay really is, and what else might be hidden in her past. It would be a difficult thing for me to come to terms with, certainly.
Other posters are quick to judge Lindsay for having lied about, or obfuscated her past, as if lies are binary; either you’re lying or you’re not, and lies are always wrong. But lies fall on a spectrum, from benign to malicious. Sometimes you lie to spare someone’s feelings, or as a social lubricant, or to serve a greater good. I can see why she would want to keep a past like that buried, and Josh’s reaction confirms that she should have.
I would not get personally involved in this trauma. They need to see a professional relationship counselor, and decide whether this can be worked out or not. This is not the sort of thing you can fix up by being a buddy with a six pack of beer. It’s a deep-seated relationship problem. Their relationship might not survive it, and that’s not because of character flaws on either of their parts.
I don’t think I’d persuade Josh to keep the engagement, but I would tell him he’s being an idiot. Lots of people do stupid things at one time or another. It’s how Lindsay is now that counts.
If he really loved her he’d want her to be happy. So he’s either going to have to get over what she did(no way it can be forgotten) . All I’d do is tell him if he truly loves her, AND wants to still marry her, then put it out of his head and never, ever, talk about it again.
This doesn’t sound like it is going to happen, so I’d remain neutral as best I can, and be there for either one of them.
As some of Heinlein’s characters said, love is when the happiness of the other person is essential to your own. Doesn’t sound like Josh is capable of that.
I’d talk to Josh, because he could probably use someone to talk to right now. I wouldn’t try to change his mind particularly, but my feeling is that this is doesn’t have to be a dealbreaker, that Lindsay is still a good person who is worth marrying, and some of that might come through.
This isn’t about your trust being broken, it’s about Josh’s trust being broken. Refusing to accept that Josh’s standards of trust may be different from yours and insisting that your standards are the only ones a person could apply is a much more narcissistic position than anything we were told about Josh at the outset.
I think it’s fascinating that the people attempting to defend Lindsay make her sound much worse to me than the OP did.
Oh, balls. Why do you keep repeating the phrase “getting them stuck in a marriage”? Are you posting from 1873 or something?
There is nothing in the OP to indicate that Lindsay is a Golddigger or that Josh has enough gold to be worth digging for in the first place. If you want, as the writer of the OP, I will stipulate that she is now an attorney while he is a schoolteacher and that she makes easily twice as much money per year as he.