An ex-boyfriend called me three months after we broke up to tell me he had just been diagnosed HIV-positive. This was the week before end-of-semester exams in my final year of law school. After 10 anxious days, my test results came back negative.
A few days later the bastard called me to let me know he was just f*cking with me.
When I was five or six years old, my best friend convinced me that he was in the employ of the FBI. Furthermore, he convinced me that he had blueprints for a fully operational death star, and that he kept these blueprints in his wallet.
Over the years this same friend made me believe many other improbable things, but FBI/death star definitely takes the cake.
Same.
One of the older girls who helped with our guide troop told me she was pregnant - and as the weeks progressed and she didn’t get any bigger, when I pointed this out she told me that the doctors gave her some pills which kept the baby small. I was about 9 at the time, and I think I had been suspicious at first, but she was so certain I let it slide. What I can’t work out is why she’d bother lying to a kid. Unless of course she had an abortion, but that doesn’t seem to fit with the situation as I remember it.
I dated a loser my senior year of high school who was capable of profoundly detailed and elaborate lies. He managed to convince me, among other things, that he had a vintage car with a cherry-flavored air freshener (he described in great detail all the work he’d put into it, down to the leather seat covers and what was left to work on.) He also managed to convince me he had received a basketball scholarship to Duke University. (I am a very, very gullible person.) For months he would agonize with me over whether or not he wanted to take the scholarship. He also made up a story about getting molested by a relative to elicit my sympathy or so I’d feel more strongly connected to him, or something.
I was positively flabbergasted to find out that people can lie about this kind of stuff, using so much detail, for no reason whatsoever and with zero remorse. Truthfulness was mandatory in the household I grew up in so it is beyond me how anyone could live to be 17 while lying so badly.
Total waste of 3 months of my life. Or maybe not. I’m not so gullible anymore.
Well, there was the one boyfriend who told me a string of lies about his work and living situations, then when keeping them up finally became too much for him told me that he had lied to me because he had a brain tumor. I, of course, laughed in his face. Luckily, my instinct on that one was correct – it was another lie. He’s gone down in the annals of my exes as Brain Tumor Boy.
Then there were all the nights that I volunteered for the rape crisis hotline and the only calls I got were from guys who would make up elaborate molestation stories and spin them out for five or ten minutes before it became obviously that they were just using the hotline to talk to a girl while jerking off. Those were pretty annoying.
a license to kilt???
I had a roommate in college who, I guess, was a pathological liar.
Sample conversation (we were dormies with a cafeteria food service plan):
Him: What time do you want to eat tonight?
Me: I’m not that hungry. Let’s wait till 6:00.
Him: I can’t; I have to meet someone at 6:00.
Me: OK, 5:00?
Him: I can eat at 6:00; I was just shitting you (laughs). Let’s eat at 6:00.
Me: Um, ok…
I.e. he would lie about things that were totally inconsequential, see if I believed him, then let me know he was lying. Why I never strangled him in his sleep I can’t imagine to this day.
“I do.”
But I can see that this is a fairly common one.
My ex BIL was a patholigical liar- he used to lie to keep in practice. And it was about the most obvious things that you knew were a lie- far too many to describe.
Religion and Santa Claus aside, nobody’s really pushed anything terrible on me.
My grandfather did tell Mum and her sisters and brother that he flew bombers in WWII (when he was working in a bank), they believed that despite the mockery of the rest of their school :o
On holiday in Potsdam, Germany, a few friends and I went to visit a stately home/palace (can’t recall the name at the moment). We asked our friend living there at the time what the historical significance of the place was. His reply: it was most well known for it’s pleasure gardens. It had a private zoo where two elephants bought to Germany by Napoleon were kept. The skeletons of the elephants are still on display.
Knowing him for the comically outrageous liar that he is we rolled our eyes and enjoyed the estate. When we were preparing to leave another of our friends protested: But we can’t leave yet! We haven’t seen the elephants.
To her shame, and our endless amusement, she was entirely sincere.
Wow. That would seriously make me rethink my feelings for her.
Joe
Yeah, I remember the instant joy of knowing my g/f was pregnant. To find out less than an hour later that she wasn’t would be heart breaking.
Parents (to my troubled young self): We love you just as much we do your sisters.
It tastes just like chicken! Try it!
As a child, Erle Stanley Gardner convinced me and my brother that the yummy Chung King Chinese Noodles we were eatin were really dried worms - ones that had crawled out on the pavement after it rained and died. (Erle was my mom’s godfather). Probably unrelated, but I never did like Perry Mason.
As an adult, it was my first boyfriend (and the only person I had slept with at that time, being freshly de-virginated) telling me that I must have picked up that STD at the doctor’s office. Yeah, I was stupid but this was before AIDS, and herpes was just starting to be noticed. I was on the pill, and everyone firgured that was safe sex in those days. Lying bastard.
I had a ex-girlfriend tell me she “could be” pregnant. It was a fucked up relationship with an extremely manipulative bitch and we were getting into fights all the time, breaking up and then getting back together again. My friends were getting tired of listening to the drama.
When I finally had enough, I broke up with her rationally instead of during a fight, as we used to. I then didn’t call back immediately, like I normally did.
A week or so later, she called to say that she was late, and was afraid that she may be pregnant. She wanted to know what to do. Pretty simple, “Take a test” I told her but she kept going on and on about how cold I was, etc. So, I caved once more and agreed to go over to her place once more so she wouldn’t be alone while she took the test.
And, of course, she wasn’t pregnant – no surprises there – but she wanted to go out and drink to celebrate. Fortunately, I didn’t fall for that one.
OK, this doesn’t come close to matching the examples above, but in its own small way it was cruel.
1991, I’m in a cab home from a club very very late on a Saturday night, and clearly not in a sober condition. The cabbie says: “Did you hear? Somebody shot Bush. Yeah, up in Kennebunkport, just happened. Killed him. They think it was someone from the military, pissed off about the Gulf War.”
Suddenly I’m a lot more sober, and it takes about five seconds for the worst to sink in… President Dan Quayle.
It wasn’t until he was dropping me home that he admitted he’d been kidding. I was too relieved to be angry.
This. But to be fair, my grandfather is a minister and didn’t see it as a lie.
Cheers,
G
I got stuck on this one. Dottygumdrop, did you hunt down and beat that cunt to death? Because if not I’d be happy to do it for you.
An individual lie from this person would take too long to explain but it eventually dawned on me after a while that a close friend of mine was a big time liar and unable to take responsibility for pretty much anything. She went through crisis after drama after fuck up and every time it was the fault of the other person. The pattern emerged eventually, and fortunately I was able to repair relationships with the other people I had potentially alienated by siding with her.