An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love by Clancy Martin provides an interesting perspective on love, marriage, and happiness. Clancy Martin argues that a large majority of people cannot comprehend true love because of self-deception and deception to their significant other. There is a stigma that true love depends on complete and utter honesty and that is simply not true. Love is many things like eroticism, deceitfulness, and satisfaction but it is not complete honesty. He discusses how we as humans commonly lie and we are taught deception at a young age and this in turn carries into our adulthood. Additionally, how intimately our deception and self-deception have influenced and altered our perception of love
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The one engaging in deception most likely does not even want to hurt their significant other by lying. It may be a simple lie like ones significant other asking if they look fat today and one lies to make them feel better. One may boast about how well they are doing at work but they are actually not doing as well as they are suggesting. However, it is substantially worse to deceive someone in the sense of infidelity or a physical affair. Additionally, an emotional affair is essentially lying because one is not telling the absolute truth. Another example would be lying about alcoholism or drug use. Moreover, ones love ultimately depends upon the deception which we ignore. Moreover, Martin believes that it is a cultural myth that authentic love is based off truthfulness. Ultimately, humans continually deceive outsiders by making them believe one’s relationship is perfect. A question to ponder is if something is a lie does it have to be not true? As a society we assume a lie is not true but this may not always be the case. There are several ways to self-deception including selective attention meaning the way we explain our beliefs to ourselves, the way we remember or forget, the kinds of storylines we use to rationalize ourselves and our beliefs. We self-deceit ourselves without knowing
The one engaging in deception most likely does not even want to hurt their significant other by lying. It may be a simple lie like ones significant other asking if they look fat today and one lies to make them feel better. One may boast about how well they are doing at work but they are actually not doing as well as they are suggesting. However, it is substantially worse to deceive someone in the sense of infidelity or a physical affair. Additionally, an emotional affair is essentially lying because one is not telling the absolute truth. Another example would be lying about alcoholism or drug use. Moreover, ones love ultimately depends upon the deception which we ignore. Moreover, Martin believes that it is a cultural myth that authentic love is based off truthfulness. Ultimately, humans continually deceive outsiders by making them believe one’s relationship is perfect. A question to ponder is if something is a lie does it have to be not true? As a society we assume a lie is not true but this may not always be the case. There are several ways to self-deception including selective attention meaning the way we explain our beliefs to ourselves, the way we remember or forget, the kinds of storylines we use to rationalize ourselves and our beliefs. We self-deceit ourselves without knowing