I was watching old episodes of Blue Bloods and Sgt Jamie had turned over some info Janko gave him to IA (which he said he was gonna do). But IA involved him some with dire promises to say nothing to anyone else. But when Janko found out afterwards, she accused Jamie of “lying to her”.
I have seen that before- some guy withholds some info from his wife, etc, later she claims that is lying.
Is not telling everything a lie?
The term for it is “lying by omission”, and yes, it’s a thing.
Nailed it in one. A word for the motive for lying is “misleading” Was Janko misled by what Jamie did or didn’t do? Yes.
The closer the relationship, the less room for maneuver there is before your behavior (again commission or omission) becomes misleading. There’s lots more room to not mention largely irrelevant stuff to casual acquaintances or distant friends than there is to your spouse or SO.
As well, how important the info is to the person you might be misleading is a large factor. I don’t know the episode, but it sure seems to me that involving IA in any co-worker’s career is kind of a big deal.
It wasnt her career. She fou8nd the lead is all.
But didnt Jamie have to follw IAs orders in this?
The personal/professional “bleedthrough” on Blue Bloods was simultaneously one of the most captivating things about the show as well as one of the most aggravating.
The Jamie/Eddie dynamic was over-the-top obnoxious and not typical of what people encounter in real life. So I don’t think an example from that show does justice to the OP’s provocative and worthy-of-discussion thread title.
I’m not someone who is committed to no-holds-barred 100% truthfulness and transparency in any one situation in life and definitely not in a relationship. I am committed to honesty, but I also don’t feel that telling your partner every single thing from your past and every thought in your head is a good idea. Every question does not have to be answered. Before either of you asks a serious question or answers one, you have to think ahead to whether one or both of you can live with the change between you that the answer might bring about. Maybe you can. Maybe it will bring you closer and make you stronger as a couple. But maybe not. People have a right to keep some things to themselves. Forever.
I’m thinking of an episode of M*A*S*H* where BJ has a one-night dalliance with one of the nurses and he immediately wants to sit down and write a letter to his wife Peg back home and confess to make himself feel better. Hawkeye talks him out of it. BJ’s penance is to live with this secret and not seek absolution at the cost of his wife’s broken heart. Maybe he will confess sometime in the future after he is back home. Or maybe not.
That’s why they call it being grown up.
This a great post and I thank you.
Altho Jamie/Janko was a little weird, I admit, it is not even close to the creepy dynamic of Tim/Chen on The Rookie.
This is very well stated.
Yeah in a serious relationship/marriage that’s a lie. Other circumstances YMMV.
They’re cops. They should follow orders. They follow orders or people die.
Well, yeah, but ya “hafta be able to handle the truth!”
See, I’m on the mind that if you know/believe that your partner knowing that about you would change their willingness to be with you, and you choose to withhold it because of that, you are deceiving your partner into being with you, and that is morally wrong. If you don’t mention something because you don’t think it’s important, that’s fine. But if you have reason to believe that it would matter to partner, and don’t tell them, that’s deception..
We will to have to simply strongly disagree. While his motivation may have been selfish, keeping his wife in ignorance is more morally wrong. It deprives her of the ability of making an informed decision on whether she wants to maintain the relationship and (if he never tells her and also deprives her of moving on earlier by delaying), may well make her continue a relationship when she never would have done so, had she known the truth. I’d gladly take a broken heart over being deceived into remaining with a cheater (and no “it was just once” doesn’t make them not a cheater). Obviously times change and there’s financial dependency issues, but I just think it’s horrible to deceive someone to being with you (short or long term) under false pretenses (and making them think you are faithful when you aren’t is a false pretense),
This. For instance, there was a girl who was a close friend of mine the last two years of high school, who I was in love with. I often thought of how and why things between us went sideways. (Eventually I came to some settled conclusions about the ‘why’ and have thought of it a lot less since then. But this was well after my wife and I got married.) But I’ve never shared these thoughts with my wife, and I can’t see what the point of it would be, even though it’s a pretty significant part of my past.
This issue would come up periodically in Ann Landers’ advice column, and she took the same position you do. And that position has always made sense to me.
Sure, if you think you’ll periodically be unfaithful in the future, you tell your spouse on account of that, so they will know what they’ll have to live with if they stay.
But one-and-presumably-done? Nope. You did the bad thing, you deal with the emotional burden.
If you tell your spouse, they forgive you before it really sinks in, you get the benefit of absolution, and your spouse is stuck for the rest of your relationship with having thoughts of you with someone else going through their head. You did the bad thing, and they get stuck with the cost.
Or they can choose to leave because they can’t deal with the knowledge of your unfaithfulness. But again, that’s a cost that the spouse has to pay.
Either way, you’ve made life worse for your spouse by confessing. (Sure, in the latter scenario, their life may ultimately be better. But there’s no way to know.) The only true path forward is to carry the guilt by yourself.
In principal, I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said. What I will say, however, is “would that the world were so simple.” I think you have missed the nuance that I have incorporated in my post.
This is much closer to where I stand. I don’t live in a black and white world.
The thing that is so hard to accept and that we have to accept (because it is reality) is that you can never fully know another human being. Even if you share every thought, and are together 24/7 for decades, you don’t know what it’s like to be in their head looking out to the world through their eyes. So we love people while only knowing a small fraction of who they are. And we take the rest of it with faith, hope, and forgiveness. Each of us and each relationship is a work in progress between and among flawed and fallible human beings.
Having principals is important. But having cast iron principles that are set in stone doesn’t allow for the fluidity of life or the ensuing, but not inevitable, growth that should happen.
Amen to this.
Why haven’t the spellers flogged me?? This should have been “principles.” I dictated this while walking, but I should have read before posting.
I noticed it, but I also noticed that you used the correct word in the very next sentence. I figured you knew the latter was correct, and had just mistyped the first instance. No point in jumping in to tell you what I was sure you already knew.
Considerate of you. 
However, I think in a situation like this, the whole confession/confrontation thing needs to be deferred until the couple are actually together, as in physically reunited. In a situation where one partner is largely incommunicado adjacent to a war zone, and the other is keeping home fires burning half a world away, trying to figure out the impact of a one-night stand on the relationship seems largely impossible.
Maybe if you’re being deployed on a five-year mission or something you should make the attempt to resolve the situation by international airmail. But if your tour of duty is ending in a few months to a year and you’re going back to your partner? I think that will be the time to put any cards on the table that you’ve decided you need or want to put there.
Notifying somebody by letter in a long-distance relationship that you’ve cheated on them, to ease the burden of your own immediate guilt feelings while leaving them to cope with the revelation on their own, is not loving behavior. I get what you’re saying about leaving somebody in ignorance of betrayal even briefly is deceiving them, but I think it’s crueler and more selfish to prioritize wiping your own slate clean at the expense of their feelings.
(Don’t married couples have these discussions when they’re planning to get married? I never married so I don’t know, but it always seemed to me like a sensible, and even crucially necessary, idea. What should we do if one of us cheats, or falls in love with somebody else, or goes through a prolonged period of not wanting sex, or wants euthanasia in a terminal illness, or whatever? ISTM that pre-marriage is the time to get the dealbreakers out in the open, so that going forward nobody has to guess what counts or doesn’t count as a “lie”.)
I don’t think so - at least I’ve never heard of it. What discussions there are are usually about more practical and immediate things - how to handle money , whether to have children and when, that sort of thing. Some of those things don’t get discussed because “of course neither of us is going to cheat” and some because what 25 year old is thinking that someone might have a prolonged period of not wanting sex or considering what they would want if they have a terminal illness? I don’t disagree that pre-marriage is the time to get deal breakers out in the open - but some of those questions are too speculative to be dealbreakers. Nobody is going to call off a wedding because of their intended’s beliefs about what they might want if they should ever become terminally ill.
I mean, there are times when having principals is important. When you’re in elementary school, for instance, or casting a play.