How far have you had to carry on a lie?

[whatacrapusername2306]

Not me, but I got deeply engrossed in a post yesterday. It was reported and removed because the OP was a blatant liar and admitted so. So out of curiosity have you ever told a white lie without giving it a second thought, then the whole thing snowballing? Years ago I did have an casual friend who lied about her son ‘possibly’ having cancer. He had a simple blood test, they called him back but she made the results sound like he was going to need chemo or something. All turned out to be complete BS. I saw a lot of people back off from her from then on.

HellsBells I’m glad that you had the chance to explore and own it .. with children it is usually obvious that what they’re doing is to make their fantasy life a better one than their actual life.
Glad you feel better now.

I know some liars IRL - and the chronic nature and sheer scale (from small to life-alteringly large) is baffling and causes chaos.

Does anyone know of useful advice for people dealing with chronic liars? Literally asking for friends and family.

I’m loving the Tracey caller and Barbarian pretending to have a third child!

I’m currently in the middle of an awkward but pointless lie - a colleague and I applied for the same job. They really wanted it and didn’t get past the first out of four stages whereas I only applied for a bit of a laugh and I got the job. They went into an absolute rage when they found out I got through to the final stage/interviews, so I told them I didn’t get the job to avoid another confrontation, They’ll find out soon enough when I leave though 😬 but seriously their initial reaction was so extreme that I will need to make sure there is someone else in the room when I tell them! No one else knows yet so no danger from the grapevine at present.

Someone I know once mentioned she used to live in New York city to impress a few colleagues. She did no such thing - she actually used to live in Croydon. Years later she talks still about it when asked by so-called impressed colleagues who've figured out it was a lie. I actually think it's a bit mean of them tbh.

Told my boyfriend’s mum I liked Christmas pudding on our first Christmas together, because I didn’t want to seem like a fuss pot.

This is my favourite 😄 I had a work colleague who’s wife made his sandwiches every day. Apparently her sandwiches are rubbish so every day he binned them. It started when they were dating and he thought it was so lovely he didn’t have the heart to tell her he hated them. They have been married for nearly 40 years now and he still bins them every day.

On the wrong name lies here, This always makes me giggle m.youtube.com/watch?v=4tgrXvMcbAM

Not me, but my mum told a huge lie (aim: parental alienation form: insestuous sexual interest from parent to child) when my parents split up. It had the capacity to ruin her, and us. I had to live inside the lie to satisfy her need for it to be believed, to contain it and stop it spilling beyond the confines of my ability to protect her from her own mouth.

It killed our realtionship. She would retell again and again over the years, usually when I was at a low ebb, it as a form of trying to make it real, so she didn't have to feel the guilt of lying.

By the time my own child was small the enormity of that lie, from a parent to a child hit me straight in the head and heart. For the first time with no filter of "must protect mum". I kind of broke.

We've been estranged for a decade and a half. She has cancer for the second time. According to people I trust the lovely mum I had before the divorce has returned. But that fucking lie is an impenetrable barrier between us. I waited all these years for my normal, really good, mum to come back and this imposter version of her to go away. She finally made it back and I'm going to lose her all over again without us ever being able to make peace.

One moment of an impulse unsuccessfully resisted and our futures changed forever.

As a child I was full of shit, but I had a crappy childhood and as another PP said, created another persona. Nothing to hurt anyone, just crap to make me more likeable/interesting. I was a separated twin for a couple of years, I needed my appendix out at some point (my sister had just had hers and I didn't realise what appendicitis was), my mom won the lottery (which is why I didn't live with her because she was always on 'holiday'), I was catalogue model and one of the saddest was that I was competition level in a sport which luckily I was very good at anyway; when we started high school we had a 'show and tell' type lesson where we had to bring something in to tell the class about ourselves and I had nothing, no achievements, no holidays or photos to show, nothing, so I created a fake certificate on the home computer and did my few minutes about this sport, my teacher must have known it was fake. Every single one of them makes me cringe inside now and luckily my friends from back then have either forgotten or don't bring it up because they knew it was a facade.

My own mother used to tell people she only had one child when there are many of us and I've known people lie about pregnancies, cancer, money, job history etc...so as embarrassing as I was at least I'm that much of a bellend.

I lied about my age when I started drinking in the local pub aged 16
But I then became friends with some of the other people who drank there, and had to carry on the lie.

One of the friends I made was a driving instructor and was always offering to give me free lessons, which I had to turn down because I was 16
But I couldn't say that, so I told him I had really bad eyesight but glasses didn't suit me, so I would rather not drive than wear glasses

I had to pretend to not be able to read menus, and the album things on the jukebox to maintain this, and when I then started going out with one of the group, he was the butt of many a joke about my dodgy eyesight (he also didn't know my real age, despite us being together for a year)

Miraculously a year later, my eyesight corrected itself enabling me to start driving without glasses

One moment of an impulse unsuccessfully resisted and our futures changed forever.

Such a beautiful, poignant phrase to capture this, CesiraAndEnrico - it captures the stone in the heart that these lies cause.

About 15 years ago my email address was something along the lines of “MarieCurie2004”.

A nice lady on Freecycle offered some baby things that were ideal for my sister. I arranged to collect them and since it was a one-off meeting I didn’t bother to correct her when she assumed that Marie Curie was my name.

Of course it’s never that simple. I regularly bump into her at the local Asda, and as bad luck would have it, she’s also very friendly and has a memory like an elephant. The first few times she asked after my sister’s baby and of course then we were classed as acquaintances so she continued to say hello. My DH is very bemused by this random lady who approaches us in the frozen aisle yelling “Hallo Marie!” My name is not Marie. I dread the day she gains some science knowledge and figures out who Marie Curie is.

Barbarian, you're my hero. Why don't you write a book about your third child, at this stage you must have enough stories to fill it.

I forgot the tooth fairy.

I told my DS a long and involved story about the difficulties and trials the poor tooth fairy had gone through to get to him and how she had simply run out of time.

It was far longer and more involved than I intended because, every time I paused for breath, he asked "...and then what happened?"

Hours it took to tell - I never forgot the tooth fairy again, I can tell you!

I had a colleague who seemed to live in a state of permanent lie.
In that lie he had a private jet he could fly, he buried his Mum several times so he could borrow money off his gullible colleagues (he was in customer support and I was in a higher position so one of those who were the gobshites running around monitoring people so not to be trusted when I didn't trust him myself) and ran away with the money and all the stuff he could steal from the apartments he rented.
The thing is, when you talked to him, he seemed to believe that he was living that other life, where he had enough money to fly around the world in his private jet and had exotic girlfriends. Must have been pathological.

On a light note-

DH and I were once staying in a nearby hotel the night before a wedding. The venue was in a converted barn in the countryside and this was the only hotel nearby so we knew that quite a few guests would be staying there.

DH went to the car to get a bag he'd forgotten to bring in and as he was passing through reception on the way back to the room felt the need to fart. In an error of judgement he decided to nip in to the lift, fart on the way to floor 1 (where our room was) and if anyone was there make a face about the terrible smell someone had left. Unfortunately, before the lift doors closed, another family came in and got to the lift before the doors closed. They were going to a higher floor and he felt embarrassed to be seen taking the lift up only one floor so, in another error of judgement, decided to fake a limp so that they would assume he was injured and not able to use the stairs. When he got to the room he confessed to me, and went to the bathroom to fart.

He then decided that it was quite likely that the family he encountered would be going to the same wedding as us. Having been focused on not farting etc he could not remember exactly what they looked like so for the whole wedding he was not sure if they were there and attempted to keep up the fictional limp/injury. He knew that he kept forgetting to limp after a few drinks so even made up a story about alcohol making the muscles relax and helping him walk normally. I'm pretty sure no one believed him but I doubt anyone guessed why he was lying!

My Dad is a compulsive liar, and he isn't very good at it so always gets found out. A childhood full of his lies and the consequences have left me with a strong feeling of disgust when I find people have lied or cheated.
Reading this thread is actually making me feel a bit anxious. Maybe I need to throw caution to the winds and sign up for some Derren Brown style therapy.

My mum had a couple of whoppers which I found out about shortly before her death and shortly after her death.

She had a wrong namer too - a chap who ran a restaurant that she visited for work purposes.. convinced her name was Pamela (it isnt, it did begin with a P though).. she didn't want to correct him so he called her Pamela for 10 years and only found out when I invited him to her funeral what her actual name was!

Here are the whoppers though..

Claimed she passed her driving test (early sixties) as her Father, assuming she would, had bought her a little van. She hadn't, and in fact, never did. She got away with it as she went to work overseas and got a licence there, and then simply swapped it for a british one when the foreign one was discovered at some point in the mid 80s (I remember that bit, but obviously didnt know the rest).

Claimed she had a degree in Zoology from Cardiff - didn't have a degree AT ALL, dropped out of Uni midway through her final year. Still managed to get a job on the strength of the degree though!

This one I discovered after her death when I found some paperwork.

I can't believe these were the only ones.. but I'll probably never know now!

I've had to rename my baby daughter Keith to keep up with a spiralling lie.

Unfortunately, my DD has inherited her father's large head and has very little hair. This, combined with my love of gender neutral clothing, meant that people quite often assumed she was a boy. Dressing her in pink dresses just made her look like a builder in drag, so didn't help matters.

One neighbour in particular was so convinced DD was a boy that no amount of gentle correcting has convinced her otherwise. Gave up in the end and went along with it - 'yes he is getting big' etc. All fine until neighbour asked the baby's name about four months back and I panicked and said 'Keith'.

To make matters worse, she asked if s/he had a middle name and I said 'richard'.

Which means at some point I either have to confess that I panicked and accidentally misgendered my own child (and got her name wrong) or actually raise her as Keith

It wasn't intentional but - a friend of mine wasn't at all academic although her parents and brothers were. She didn't go on to further education and began work in a supermarket specialising in frozen food.

Her father bumped into an acquaintance who started to quiz him about the family and how they all were/what they were doing etc. (Can you see where this is going?)

When it came to the daughter he said she was very happy and working in Iceland. The acquaintance was really pleased that my friend had made something of her life although he was sure that the family must miss her and did she come home often?

I told my DS a long and involved story about the difficulties and trials the poor tooth fairy had gone through to get to him and how she had simply run out of time.

See Tanith this is the reason I simply said to my kids, put your tooth under your pillow and I'll come in and put some money under it when you're asleep.

I've forgotten a few times and all I've had to say is, "Oh I'm so sorry DC, I forgot! Let's try again tonight."

I lived in an imaginary world as a solitary, only child. I wrote stories and invented games and alter egos, but it began to spill over into real life and I was regaling schoolfriends about my 'cousin Anthea' and all the adventures she had. I was about 7 or 8. Every day they would ask what cousin Anthea had been up to, and one particularly sensational story they insisted I share with the teacher. She listened patiently to this obviously outrageous made-up story and quietly said, you should keep your stories for writing down. I was so ashamed and embarrassed that I never told any more stories about her. In my late teens someone said I was a very "smooth liar", so I worried that it was a flaw in my character, and tried desperately to keep fact and fantasy apart from then on.

These responses are brilliant. I suppose most of us have had the santa/easter bunny/tooth fairy questions that just making the situation more unbelievable. I have lied so much about all 3, that I cannot remember what I’ve actually said.

Baby Keith

When I was younger (16ish) I’d go over to my boyfriends house and for some reason would panic if his mom asked me if I’d like some food / a drink and say I didn’t like whatever she was offering me! By the time we’d been together for a substantial amount of time she thought I was the pickiest eater. The worse one was cheesecake :(

I worked in a veterinary practice where we often rehomed animals.

A lady came in to look at a stray cat, and we struck up a conversation. I wasn't wearing my name tag, and she got my name wrong after I had introduced myself.

I didn't bother correcting her as I thought there was no point and I wouldn't end up seeing her again.

Turns out she wanted to name the cat after me as I had been so kind to her. I had to confess then to answering to the wrong name and it was all a bit awkward.

Another one.....

At the same practice, I had an old primary school teacher come in, who mistook me for my older sister, who she had also taught. I was about to correct her but the vet interrupted her and I didn't get a chance after that.

The next time she came in she started asking me how my younger sister was getting on (who is actually me of course!). I didn't know what to do and panicked so I sort of swapped me and my sisters lives around and pretended to be my sister, whilst telling her about my older sister as if she was actually my younger sister!

It was all very strange and convoluted and I started hiding out the back whenever she came in as I was so embarrassed and desperate not to make things worse!

Oh the tangled webs we weave.......

BarbarianMum, I love your story!

Yes, I lied to a man about my address. I told him I was living in a street which was a few streets away from the one I actually lived in. I was about 19 at the time and I don't even remember why I did that but reaching back into the mists of time I think it was because I thought he was after me. Later that night he gave me a lift home and drove straight to the wrong street and asked me what number I lived at. I thought I could brazen it out by just getting out of the car, waving goodbye and walking off to my real house. But when we got there he took my bag and sewing machine out of the car and carried it right through the gate onto the front doorstep. I was mortified, and terrified the real owners would come out and ask what I was doing unloading my things onto their doorstep. Luckily he drove away and I never saw him again. I sometimes wonder whether he ever came to visit me at that house.