I think to actually be a compulsive liar, you have to believe what you say is the truth. So, I don’t think compulsive liars are aware. The others, those who liar with some type of intent, probably feel they’re justified.
That doesn’t make sense. Surely the definition of lying is to knowingly say something which is untrue. If you say something which is untrue but which you believe, well isn’t that just a mistake?
I don’t know whether this counts, but when I was in college, I would intentionally create a new persona for myself in random situations. I didn’t do it around friends or family members or co-workers or even classmates, but if I was in a place where no one knew me nor was I ever likely to run into any of these people again, I’d just make up stuff on the spur of the moment - where I was from, my experiences, etc.
In retrospect, I think it was my weird method of trying to “come out of my shell,” so to speak. I had always been ridiculously shy, lacked self-confidence, and always felt like the homely, geeky stereotype. I wanted to be so much more glamorous and exotic and attractive than I felt, and it seemed at the time that my various “personae” were viewed in just that way.
That little experiment only happened a few times, over the course of maybe three or four months when I was 18 or 19 years old, and I never again encountered any of my “test subjects.” I guess I finally just realized that I was stuck being me… 
Only my ex-wife, Morgan Fairchild.
I have known a great many people who have lied and boasted to me on a regular basis.
But then, I covered Congress and The White House.
I prefer to think that he quotes you on ‘FX’, and that you’re just holding your tongue.
is there anyone who HASN’T met anyone who compulsively lies to make themselves look better? i’ve known quite a few. a minority, definitely, but still significant. i know more compulsive boasters than say… openly gay people.
How do you know my husband? Not meaning to make light. We are on very shaky ground. There are problems that individually be surmountable, but collectively have grown to be too much, and what has caused me to lose hope is that he not only isn’t doing anything about them, he lies to me, looking me right in the eye, telling me he’s done something which I know and can easily prove he has not.
I believe that it’s not malicious, or even consciously done.
My mother (bless her heart), listening to me whine about being lied to, took it upon herself to research pathological liars. I’m not sure that’s what my husband is, but my mom’s pretty convinced. One thing she said is that the things they say become true to them as soon as they say them. Another was that it’s very difficult to treat because pathalogical liars rarely admit they need treatment, and even if they do they lie in therapy which keeps them from making progress.
I also know a man professionally who spins elaborate tales of all sorts of amazing feats about touring with Led Zeppelin or advising Presidents and surfing in Australia…not that he didn’t surf there, but none of us believes he was a pro surfer in the same years he’s told others of us he was working on the Alaskan pipeline…In commentary for whichever Harry Potter movie Kenneth Brannagh said of his character, “If you’ve been to the moon, he’s been to the moon and back” and that’s a perfect description for this guy.
I’ll admit that I’ve done the opposite of what the OP suggests with some regularity. By that I mean that I’ve played dumb or intentionally said or implied that I didn’t know something that I absolutely did know and understand well.
Generally this is not to appear superior or overly geeky or whatever.
I’m beginning to wonder if some of the cases people refer to are people spinning yarns that weren’t meant to be believed. I though the OP was about those who not only frequently produced fictional accounts, but also insisted on them being absolutely true, and continued to fabricate to support the previous stories. I’ve known people who insist urban myths happened to them, or a family member, or close friend. Untrue certainly, but they don’t do it frequently, and wouldn’t come up with a phony car accident to explain being late or missing an appointment. I know people who have made up excuses to cover up a mistake, something most of us learn relatively young is a way to make a problem worse. But I think the people who frequently, or compulsively lie, for whatever reason, and will not ever acknowledge their lies, are a unique breed.
I agree. This man seems to do it because he realizes he is on rocky ground and tries to cover it. If he really thinks you are onto him, he will focus on something else to avoid the conversation. This man has major issues. He doesn’t know if his mother is alive or dead and won’t face the death of others. Can’t call his FIL to say “sorry about the passing of a child.” Fakes illness to gain sympathy. Can’t plan ahead. And more. He says he is an aeronautical engineer. He works as a programmer. Go figure.
A friend of mine is like this. He is constantly inventing new projects to make himself look “in demand.” It’s as if, rather than saying, “I wish I could do X”, he’s always saying, “I’m doing X.” He’s a theatre director and makes up nonstop lies (which are easily disproved) about which show he’s going to direct next and where. He also constantly lies about the many men who find him wildly attractive, going so far as to create 2 separate fake Facebook accounts featuring very grainy pictures of guys who have only 1 friend- him. He then will write on his on Facebook wall, comments like, “You are so much fun! When are you going to come to Chicago where everyone loves you so you can be a theatre god? I know more than 1 guy who is madly in love with you up here!” And don’t think I’m exaggerating. What’s particularly sad is that it’s clearly him- the punctuation, spelling, etc. are the same. He does it because he is insecure and wants to impress people. I just don’t even acknowledge it anymore- I still love him and like to hang out with him because he’s very fun and funny, but when he gets to telling these lies, I just make some sort of non-committal grunt and move on with the conversation.
Some of these stories amaze me. Like Green Rossetta’s. I wish I knew a pathological liar just so I could pick their brains.
My older brother. I cannot trust a thing he says. It’s always been pretty sad…
I’ve known one person like this. In hindsight I strongly suspect that he was a sociopath. Not only did he lie frequently for no particular reason, he also had a vicious streak a mile wide. He was very apt for revenge and desired control over others. He also had no ethics to speak of and often bragged that people who did were chumps, and that he knew better. He considered caring for anyone a fault.
The sad thing is that he thought he was so very clever about the lies but most of them were just a little puzzling, or easily seen-through. He thought it proved how smart he was that he would lie to people and they would believe them. The thing is that he would generally lie about stuff that nobody cared about, like where he’d been or stories from his high school. Why would anyone want to investigate and cross-check him lying about things that don’t matter? He also liked to brag a great deal about how attractive he was to other men and how he withheld sex from them if they didn’t do what he liked, and whatever, but by the point where he started cruising a lot, we were already pretty wise to his BS.
Mostly this was due a particular falling out. We had agreed to live together with my dorm roommate since we could get a better deal together and hung out a lot at that time. After that he started with a lot of the imperious claims about how smart he was… which went on to be how dumb we were. Mostly I just sort of rolled my eyes at it at the time. Anyway, one night we were drinking and he was being a typical ass. We were telling practical joke stories and he claimed he’d never been played a joke on because he was far too smart for that. I said anyone could fall for a joke sometime and he said, to me, that I was too stupid to ever dream of tricking him. Yeah, whatever. While he’s going on like this, I’m playing with his keyring and – right in front of him, mind you – I slip his dorm room key off the ring and replace it with my key, which looks identical but won’t fit his room of course. My roommate sees and smiles, all the while he’s going on that he’s so smart, he never trusts anyone, blah blah.
Well the original plan was to follow him to his room and laugh at him, but we got rather deep in our cups and forgot about it. He left, and I didn’t remember until the next day. I tried to track him down but he wasn’t in his room so I figured I’d see him after class, as we did most every day. I figured his roommate let him in or something. He turned up later and I asked him about it, and he said he had gotten the lock re-keyed because he thought it was broken. D’oh! Well I apologized and immediately offered to pay for the lock change fee ($30), and apologized. I mentioned the conversation. All the while he’s just getting this look of absolute and utter rage on his face. He’s going all Incredible Hulk or whatever.
Anyway, so as soon as I stop talking – and really, I felt bad, I wasn’t backhanded or anything – he just starts ripping into me. He told me that this was the most vile thing that anyone had ever did to him (which was a bit surprising, considering all the gaybashing stories he used to spin about his hometown) and that he would never forgive me. I was just basically going woah, woah, it was just a little joke, and sorry. But he was just absolutely furious. He then told me that he was not paying me and my roommate back for money he had lent from us for the apartment deposit (several hundred dollars) because we had wasted his time waiting for the key replace guy (15 minutes). I told him I was getting my money back from him and that it was wrong to try to withhold it, he said I’d never see a dime, whatever. We didn’t talk to each other for about six months until we moved in together. Which was a super healthy environment, by the way. 
Anyway, he kept lying just as much. He pretended to forget about what happened and I didn’t mention it, but he definitely got worse, because instead of hanging out with his friends (who were all friends of ours), he mostly hung out at gay bars trying to pick up men. Then, he’d come home and brag about his pickups and try to impress us. Many of those stories seemed obviously false but we didn’t pay much mind. Just stupid stuff, mostly. Stories obviously re-spun to make him seem smart, attractive, or whatever.
In the end though, I did get his money back. Mr. “I am the master of lies and nobody can fool me” put all the bills in his name, so I just declined to pay him back for the missing amount and told him why. My roommate did the same. I can’t put into words how shocked he was, by what seemed to me so incredibly obvious. He didn’t even fight it at all, even though I was prepared to defend myself in small claims based on my original loan. He just seemed so wounded over the whole thing.
I heard through a friend that he convinced his parents that we had stolen it from him maliciously and they paid him out of pocket because he threw a tantrum. Classy guy. The same friend told me he got better over the years but eh. I had more than enough.
I had a friend who was the opposite of these stories, maybe. Like the other subjects of these posts his stories would set of every ones BS detector. He didn’t do the little lie things, just tell these elaborate and preposterous tales clearly designed to make him look cool.
At some point in the 90s the FAA put online all reported air “incidents.” When he learned about this he wanted to look up his, and sure enough, there where FAA reports backing up his preposterous general aviation accidents. That really made everybody think, if those stories were essentially true, were the rest of his stories also true?
Hey, we dated the same girl! I think a bogus marriage proposal would have been a lot less complicated though.
'Cause for me, at some point, post-break-up (I dumped the crazy), she started telling people that she had dumped me because she knew that I was really gay and in love with BuddyOfMine. She said she thought the best thing she could do for me was dump me so I be able to hide behind her as my beard.
At the time I was in something like year two of a serious long-term relationship with my then-girlfriend, and everyone Lying Ex was talking to already new she was a grade A liar, she was famous for fibbing. But it was really weird to have people come up to me and ask WTF was wrong with Lying Ex, because she was telling these new stories years after we’d last seen each other.
I had an ex-girlfriend like this (a lot of these replies seem to start this way).
She would lie about little things but the worst of it was when she TWICE “attempted” suicide. We were 17, so we were both pretty new to this dating thing. And on a Wednesday we had said “let’s go out to dinner” the next day. I end up not talking to her during the day and when we sit down to dinner she tells me all about her suicide attempt the night before. She said she swallowed 31 aspirin and that her mom noticed her acting weird so they took her to emergency to have her stomach pumped.
By itself, not a screaming obvious lie. But when you put together all the little details she used to spice up the story, it became clear. She supposedly swallowed the pills around 4 AM and by 6 AM she was having her stomach pumped. Which would be around 12 hours before our dinner. Which she should not have been able to attend because the hospital would have wanted to monitor her for complications from the stomach pump/suicide attempt.
The second “suicide attempt” actually caused us to break up. She planned some end of summer picnic and when I picked her up she told me how she had slit her wrists after her best friend called her and told she couldn’t come to the picnic. But thankfully, she told me, it wasn’t a real suicide attempt, it was that she was a cutter, always had been. She just got too close to her wrists last night and it scared her.
I’ll bet you can see where this is going. At the picnic (which was setup next to a pond), she stripped down to a bikini and there wasn’t a scratch on her. Her skin was perfectly smooth and didn’t have any of the tell-tale thin scars that cutters have. And there were definitely no fresh cuts on her wrists.
So not only was a habitual liar, she was stupid too.
I know this guy who came over from another country and can barely speak English. However, he always said that if he had gone to school in this country he would have been the President by now.
This girl that lived a few houses down from us when we were little eventually moved out of state and when we were teenagers she came to stay with us for a week.
During the whole visit she kept talking about her boyfriend back home named Bobby. She threw his name into every conversation and would brag about how much he loved her and how hot he was. Every night during the week, she would write him long love letters and would make us help her find just the right words to put in her love letters. In the morning, she would ask my mom if she could please mail her letter of the day as soon as possible so her beloved Bobby would get it soon so he wouldn’t miss her so much. (this was 1980, pre e-mail)
After her week long visit, we were more than happy to see her off. We were sick of Bobby this and Bobby that. A few days later we received her stack of letters in the mail, “return to sender - no such address”
No such Bobby.