"Liars,Liars"

5 Ways To Spot A Liar


Hear the Voices

How can we spot the lies we’re told, both the little white ones that don’t matter a whole lot and the real whoppers that do? Try these compelling tips from the experts. Ever notice the pitch of someone’s voice change from its norm? Hear a voice crack when it isn’t the cracking type? Pay attention to voice changes like these; they may well indicate deceit. When Paul Ekman teamed with Maureen O’Sullivan, professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco, to test 509 people for their ability to spot liars, the results were telling. The group included Secret Service, CIA and FBI personnel, as well as psychiatrists and college students. They were shown a videotape of ten individuals who were either lying or telling the truth. On the tape, one woman described the lovely flowers she was supposedly looking at.


Though she was smiling as she spoke, a few keen observers detected an odd hesitation in her voice. Her words lacked joy, and her hands seemed tense, not relaxed. One of the Secret Service agents labeled her a liar, and he was right. She wasn’t looking at flowers at all, but rather at a graphic film the evaluators were showing. (The Secret Service employees, by the way, nailed the liars 86 percent of the time, better than others in the group.) Though other important behaviors need to be considered as well, vocal changes that deviate from the norm can indicate deception. “There may also be a change in speech rate, either too fast or too slow, and a change in breathing pattern,” says O’Sullivan.

Watch Those Words

How about written material? Can we spot misleading behavior in letters, documents, e-mails and even résumés? At the University of Texas at Austin, psychology professor James Pennebaker and colleagues have developed computer software known as Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), which analyzes written and verbal content for lies. Deception can reveal itself in two significant ways, explains Pennebaker. First, liars tend to use fewer firstperson pronouns—words like I, me, mine—than truth tellers. It’s as if they’re putting psychological distance between themselves and their stories; they don’t “own” their message. “The paperwork was sent yesterday” is an example, as opposed to the direct and personal “I sent it yesterday.” Second, liars use fewer exclusionary words— but, nor, except, whereas. They have trouble with complex thinking, says Pennebaker, and it shows.

Look Past Shifty Eyes

While most people tend to interpret darting, unfocused eyes as a classic sign of lying, what’s vital to consider is the context of the behavior. (Experienced poker players, of course, are careful not to make too much of eye “tells.”) “If people look away while trying to think of something difficult, that is not important,” says O’Sullivan. “But if they look away while answering something that should be easy to answer, you should wonder why.” And what is the conversation about, anyway? The subject matter is critical. “If people are lying about something they’re ashamed of, they’ll have difficulty maintaining eye gaze,” notes O’Sullivan. “For white lies, though, or lies that aren’t shameful, people may actually increase their eye gaze.”

Get Batter At Body Language

No single part of the face or body, such as the eyes, nose, ears or hands, can tell us the whole story when it comes to lying. It’s not that simple. “There is no Pinocchio’s nose,” says Ekman flatly. Instead, “you must consider the fit among face, body, voice and speech to reach high levels of accuracy.” That means observing the “total person” whenever possible. “Clues must always be interpreted in light of the usual behavior,” explains O’Sullivan. “Changes in small hand movements, changes in the amount of hand gestures, shrugs that are inconsistent with what’s being said”—these are worth homing in on, she suggests. So are changes in body posture at particular points in a conversation. Watch for “a change in the baseline,” says O’Sullivan. “For instance, a quiet person who talks a lot, or a person who talks a lot who is now quiet. It doesn’t necessarily mean someone’s lying, but it’s a hot spot to evaluate.”

Check For Emotional "leaks"

The micro-expressions that flit across people’s faces often expose what they’re truly feeling or thinking, as opposed to what they’d like us to believe, explains Ekman. But these ultra-brief facial movements, some lasting a quarter of a second, aren’t a cinch to spot. Even professionals trained in the art of lie detection—police personnel, judges, attorneys—can’t always isolate them. And deliberate liars tend to layer on other expressions, like smiling, to further disguise a lie. Still, there are giveaways. “It isn’t the frequency of a smile that matters, but the type of smile,” says Ekman. “There are smiles of true enjoyment, which involve not just the lips but the muscles that orbit the eyes. And there are masking smiles, which are made to cover fear, anger, sadness or disgust. If you’re a good observer, you can see a trace of one of those emotions leak through.” So here’s hoping the next time someone lobs a lie our way, we’ll know just how to catch it.

"Don't Be Decieved By Liars"

Lying

I hate being lied to. Short of violence, it is the worst thing you can do to me. Not because of God, or the Ten Commandments, or any universal moral precepts. The reason that I hate lies is because, like you, I wish to navigate carefully through life, and to do so I must be able to calculate my true position. When you lie to me, you know your position but you have given me false data which obscures mine.

Lying is theft. When you tell me something which I take to be true and as a result I invest my time, or my money, or even my care, you have stolen these things from me because you obtained them with false information.

Lying creates inequality. Since you also do not like being lied to--I have never known anyone who wanted to be deceived-- you have acted as if there were two classes of humans: you, with the right to lie, and everyone else, who must be truthful to you so that you too will not lose your way.

Lying treats people as means to the end you wish to accomplish, and not as ends in themselves.

Lying is one of those rare areas in which the moral rulebook and the legal one overlap each other quite neatly. Fraud is defined as an intentional falsehood on which another relies to his detriment. A fraud is a lie writ large, often in a financial context, where the damage to me is quantifiable in money. Even those lies which the law does not define as fraud tend to fit the same definition: a knowing false utterance which the mark is intended to rely on to his harm, and does. The only differences are of degree, for example, when we cannot assess the loss in money.

The basic tenet that lying is wrong seems to be universal to all cultures, probably because humans are social animals. To live together in a society we must tell the truth to each other about such basic matters as sources of food or of danger. Sissela Bok writes in Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life:

A society, then, whose members were unable to distinguish truthful messages from deceptive ones, would collapse. But even before such a general collapse, individual choice and survival would be imperilled. The search for food and shelter could depend on no expectations from others. A warning that a well was poisoned or a plea for help in an accident would come to be ignored unless independent confirmation could be found.

Since even liars agree that lying is wrong, to the extent that they do not wish to be lied to and to lose their way, there are some remarkable special cases in our society: we justify some lies and are resigned to others. Why does indignation fail in certain cases?

Public and private spheres. Before looking at specific cases, I would like to dispose of the idea that, where lying is concerned, there is an important distinction to be made between public and private life. Some people believe lying is more justified in one area than the other. This can cut either way: we tolerate a politician who lies because he adores, and is rigorously faithful to, his wife of forty years. Or we excuse a friend's marital infidelity because we believe him to be of complete integrity in business relationships.

Ross Perot pointed out, correctly in my view, that where lying is concerned you cannot separate the spheres. He did not want adulterers working for him because "any man who will lie to his wife will lie to me." You can test this assertion by asking yourself: why wouldn't he? Because his wife is a thing to him but I am a person? There is no answer to the question likely to inspire continuing confidence in the individual. Once we know that another violated a relationship of trust and reliance, there is no moral distinction to be drawn based on the "sphere" in which the deed occurred.

Infidelity. Sexual infidelity has become so common in our society that it is increasingly treated as if it were a sociological phenomenon rather than a moral issue: men are more likely to have multiple mates and families during life, women are more likely to have one. As Richard Dawkins teaches us in The Selfish Gene, both approaches can be "evolutionarily successful strategies": investing maximum time in a few offspring gives them a better chance of survival; having as many offspring as possible with multiple mates makes it likely that at least some will survive, though you have invested no time in them. Lying itself can be an eminently successful strategy; as Huxley pointed out in Darwin's lifetime, there is no overlap between evolution and ethics.

Infidelity is of interest for our purposes here because it is involves lying (if we choose to have an open relationship, there is no infidelity, so the phrase itself requires that a lie have occurred). In being unfaithful, I create a situation in which my wife has a false view of reality: she loses her way. She reposes all her trust and love in me based on an understanding that we are exclusive, that all my concern is invested in her, and this understanding is completely false. She is in effect living in a house which may appear solid but has no foundation. I can't imagine a greater fraud than to steal years of someone's life this way. The opportunity costs are tremendous: your spouse had the opportunity to find someone else who was truthful and build a life with him and you robbed her of that.

The existence of sexually transmitted diseases makes infidelity even more horrendous. Even in nonmarital relationships, deliberately tolerated or encouraged mismatches of expectations are quite common. If one member of a couple has communicated a wish to be exclusive, in my rulebook the other has a reciprocal responsibility to be truthful about whether or not this is agreeable. The consequences of lying are not just emotional but because of disease, may bring severe physical harm. There are many people who contracted AIDS from a companion they thought was faithful, but even if the ailment is merely an itch curable by penicillin you had no right to make me run a risk I never chose to undertake, any more than you have the right to steal an hour of my time with a lie.

Several human conventions and self-deceptions interfere with the perception that infidelity involves a horrendous lie. Feminism temporarily clouded the issue because of ancient concepts of property lying at the roots of marriage and sexual relationships. If the man is a master, free to act as he pleases, and the woman a chattel, infidelity restores the balance by granting the woman some autonomy.

Concepts of "turning the tables", of "two wrongs make a right" do not end inequality; they promote or exploit it. Once relationships are reconceived as a partnership of equals, having nothing to do with "mastery" or "property", the obligation of truthfulness comes to the fore, as it does in any kind of partnership.

Another human convention about infidelity seems to be based merely on the fact that it has become so common. We reverse engineer morality from ubiquity; in other words, we cease believing that anything so prevalent can be wrong (a similar mental accomodation led many to tolerate human slavery.) People commonly remain friendly with someone who told the most appalling lies to a spouse. A related kind of tolerance is engendered sometimes from the lack of legal consequences; we sometimes confuse the legal plane with the moral, so as to say that if the behavior does not result in a judgment for damages, it is not "wrong" in a fundamental sense. Ironically, the reconception of marriage as a partnership of equals in this case has had the unintended consequence of diminishing our sense of shock at adultery. Two career marriages are common, and alimony almost unknown today; therefore there is increasingly a conception that someone who did not end up in a mess (struggling to take care of two families) could not have done something wrong. (Of course, when adulterers more commonly ended up in financially untenable situations, this as frequently excited the compassion of the people around them. My wife remembers bitterly the "friends" who said, "But he's a student!" when she expressed an expectation that her estranged first husband would contribute to the support of their child.) But it is incorrect to work backwards from a lack of consequences to the morality of an action; human life is inherently ragged and uneven and an action violating a moral rule does not inevitably lead to any punishment.

Another set of excuses arise from a loss of respect for the institution of marriage. Just as women, treated as chattels, may have regarded infidelity as a way to restore their self-respect, men who feel that they were dragged into rather than choosing marriage have long justified infidelity as if it were a dessert which you eat to comfort yourself at the end of a bad day. There is an entire literary genre of the 1960's, which I find to be infantile and unreadable: the self-pitying novel of adultery, by a male author, presumably autobiographical, where marriage is portrayed as an absurd collection of social expectations which the protagonist undertakes because he has no choice and because society expects it. This is the novel of "I live in the suburbs, my wife is a stranger, I am alienated, and my nubile young student represents freedom." Such excuses are pathetic because they justify lies by denying that the liar is a moral actor: he is just a chip in a billow, carried into marriage. By blaming society, his or her parents, the spouse, everyone but himself, he obscures what is essentially a simple situation: as a moral actor, he has a responsibility either to make it work, as earlier generations did, or not to be there. But the "not to be there" must also be seen through a lens of moral responsibility, because where there has been very substantial reliance, "make it work" may be the only moral choice. Otherwise its too facile. "She invested thirty years of her life in me, but she's not who I thought, so I'm going to abandon her and start over," should not be an easy or common choice.

I love being married. Marriage in my book is about equality, partnership and truth. The ideal is a relationship of complete trust and corresponding simplicity, the most uncomplicated and invigorating atmosphere on earth.

Lying in business. Commerce is an ancient and respectable human activity that predates written language. If I have extra wheat and you have extra apples, lets work out a trade. While to many people today, lying and business are as inextricably entangled as deceit and war, there is nothing about the fundamental nature of commerce which dictates that lying form an essential part.

A business organization is a form of human community dedicated to commerce. As such, it can be based on the same assumptions as any other type of community: that people are ends, not means, and that the community is formed for the benefit of all. While a few businesses are run so that the employees are all equal (co-ops and ESOP's), even those more hierarchically organized can be based on the premise that people treated with honesty and concern will respond with loyalty and hard work.

If this sounds impossibly idealistic, it is not. I am a businessman and have founded and run companies based on this premise. Companies, like any other community, are held together by a type of glue. In political communities, there are three types available, fear, greed or loyalty; businesses are usually based on either greed or loyalty, as fear does not apply when there is a large choice of other communities which can be easily joined by changing jobs.

People may work in a business based on lies without being disturbed by it if they are resigned to it and especially if the lies do not impact them personally (similar to the tolerance of adultery by friends mentioned above.) They may tolerate an environment in which they are routinely lied to if the financial opportunity is large enough and especially if they are of the type who can thrive in an environment of lies. However, I believe most people would prefer, if the opportunity exists, to work in a company whose goals they approve and which treats them as human beings and not as things. If I am correct about this, then it follows that they look to business leadership with the same standards as any other kind of leadership. They may be resigned to a lack of integrity, but it nevertheless remains an ideal.

Businesses can be tremendously successful without engaging in fraud. While we may be suckered into buying products that are highly hyped, we also have a special affection for, and often a lifelong relationship to, products that accomplish a job unpretentiously and about which no extraordinary claims are made. I value the car I drive, and will buy another of the same kind, because it hasn't broken down in six years, not because I believe that by owning it I am younger or better-looking than I actually am.

One of the companies in which I worked had a business model which was ninety percent sales and ten percent implementation. I am not implying any dishonesty built into the model; there are businesses where finding the opportunity is most of the work, and delivering the result is much easier. Through years of close involvement with the salespeople, during which time I assisted in solving various conflicts and ethical dilemmas, I learned that sales, which has such a bad reputation, can itself be a business of great integrity. At its most transparent, sales involves the matching of a problem and a solution, or a need and the thing which satisfies it. The salesperson, rather than lying to the purchaser and getting him to want something unsuitable, can simply work to eliminate the friction of the system by honestly addressing the purchaser's concerns.

There is an incentive to be honest in business, as in other kinds of activities, which works entirely on a practical and not a moral plane. Customers who discover that they have been lied to will not return; employees who have been lied to will leave, and it will become harder to recruit new ones. These practical incentives do not always work (economic necessity, the lack of choice, or simply the ease of obfuscation and difficulty of transmitting information, may be enough to counter them.) Nevertheless, they work enough of the time that the consequences of deception provide a practical brake on the system.

Leadership and Lying. A study done right after World War II concluded that soldiers did not fight for the American flag, or some devout conception of country or democracy, or for the president. They fought for the other members of their squad, the smallest unit of the huge community of which they were members.

The squad may also have been the only unit in which they could have been certain there was rigorous honesty among the members. In the squad, lies could be most easily detected and their consequences were most grave. Since our daily survival depends on our watching each other's backs, if you are not carrying the weight, if you are making excuses and taking more from me than you are giving, I will certainly know. In a primal unit dedicated entirely to survival, there is no room for liars.

It is interesting to compare the beauty and simplicity of the squad with the larger components of the community. Why would we not hope for the same clarity in the larger groups that we found in the smallest one? Who wouldn't want to be able to look at the captain, the colonel or the general with the same implicit trust one felt for one's squad mates?

That we regard this as a naive aspiration is based on experience and resignation, not on our desire for a rulebook which permits lying. These distinctions are built into our vocabulary: we talk about politicians lying, not leaders; not every politician is a leader, not even one in a position of ostensible leadership.

A leader is like a flag: we want to know what he stands for in order to salute him. We want him to take our side, solve our problems, treat us as people rather than chattel, and be responsive to our opinions. His honesty is the cornerstone of the structure; if we catch him lying to us it is impossible to be confident he is carrying out the rest of his mission.

While many people are resigned to being lied to by politicians, few will defend the premise that a leader should lie to us for our own good. Even liars want the people around them to be truthful, so that they do not lose their own way.

A leader who is tasked with acting as navigator for an entire community must seek to have people around him who will give him rigorously accurate information, so he does not crash the vessel on the rocks. If he is a liar, he has arrogated the right to himself to be the only one in the system, as he could not do his job if the others around him behaved as he did.

Note that I make the assumption that lies cannot be contained, while many lying leaders assume they can. We can all collaborate to lie to the public, as long as we are honest with one another: this was the ethic of the Nixon administration and of many other governments through-out history. Crisis situations tend to bring out this ethic; in crises, war being a prime example, conventional rulebooks are suspended and fraud (alongside force) is engaged to achieve our goals.

As Sissela Bok points out, apologists for lying have long maintained that there are people to whom we owe no obligation of truth. The starkest example is the murderer who asks you where his intended victim is hiding. This hypothetical, discussed by every philosopher who has analyzed the phenomenon of lying, divides the absolutists from the relativists. Kant, an absolutist, maintained we must not even lie to a murderer. Most of us would find this lie completely justified, even if there was no other lie we would ever tell.

At the other extreme, we may create structures in which we "owe no obligation of truth" to large groups of people, based on such factors as race, geographical origin, economic status, or the mere fact that they are our "followers." Here the exception winds up eating the rule: we may have no obligation of honesty to anyone except a select few--and we may even betray those when there is something else to be gained. We can call this the "organized crime" theory of leadership.

Human inertia leads to complacency sometimes. We tolerate the harm a friend did another because we do not want to give up a friend. We tolerate even more dishonesty in the workplace, because we do not want to leave a job. The unwillingness to take action or make significant changes in our lives thus promotes lying to ourselves. Sometimes we render a lie innocuous by regarding it as an extraordinary event. Someone told a lie to promote a particularly important goal, but now that things have returned to normal he will return to truth and I can count on him.

The problem is that this flies in the face of human nature. Just as bodies in motion tend to remain in motion, liars who have succeeded in obtaining something important through a falsehood should be expected to utter another one when there is something else to obtain. Lies become habitual and the goals may be of decreasing importance.

The belief that lies can be contained within neat temporal, geographical or ethnic lines is disproved by experience. "[F]ew lies," says Bok, "are solitary ones":

The first lie 'must be thatched with another or it will rain through.' More and more lies may come to be needed; the liar always has more mending to do. And the strains on him become greater each time...

After the first lies, moreover, others can come more easily. Psychological barriers wear down; lies seem more necessary, less reprehensible; the ability to make moral distinctions can coarsen...

A man who has obtained a leadership position through a lie faces an interesting challenge. If he cannot convince the people around him that there was no lie, then he must try to persuade them that it was the last one; in other words, that lies can be contained. Since his entire authority, the position itself, was obtained by that lie, it will be a very difficult task. It is on a moral plane with: "We had to commit one murder to achieve our goals, but there will never be another." In life, as in the movies, everyone usually has their knives out a remarkably short time after this statement is made.

Excuses

In the graphic hypothetical of the killer seeking his victim, we face an extraordinary situation. The rules have broken down (or the authorities who could apply them cannot reach us in time) and we are in a state of nature where the individual we are facing is prepared to apply force.

However, even in this situation we have other choices. We could respond with force, or run away, or refuse to answer. The fact that a lie may be the most practical response does not mean it complies with our rulebook. Nor are we compelled to rewrite the rules to accomodate it.

Here we face the old confusion between the moral and practical. Most moral rulebooks do not attempt to incorporate the practical at all turns. (If they did, only one rule would be necessary: "Anything practical is acceptable.") It may be highly practical to throw some people from the lifeboat when the waves get high or food is short (it may be even more practical to kill and eat them.) But under most of our rulebooks, it would be a highly unethical choice.

Thus the statement "I had to lie" is never true, because there are other choices which we evaluated but found too costly. A common experience of my generation was the choice of whether to lie to avoid the draft during Vietnam. (I turned 18 the year the draft ended. I had already formulated the ideas I am expressing here,but I cannot say with certainty that I would have had the courage of my convictions.) On the one hand, most people who evaded the draft had a genuine belief that the war was immoral. On the other hand, many missed the fact that draft evasion was not a moral choice, nor was it in any way (because concealed) an act of protest. On a spectrum of moral statement, two other choices were more honest. The highest form of protest, involving the most personal risk, was to refuse to serve and accept the consequences. Few people had the courage to do this. Another choice was to withdraw from the community altogether and go live in another country, which more people did.

Draft evaders, by contrast, became "free riders" who continued to accept the benefits of American society without paying the price that society demanded in return. As such, they were on the same moral plane as welfare cheats and anyone else who obtains something on false pretenses.

In a Hobbesian state of nature, we may face stark choices. In wars, good men may face each other every day in circumstances which they did not choose and from which only one can emerge alive. Still, there is a choice made, to kill and live, where another path was available (to die rather than kill.) The choice to live, though natural and understandable, need not be elevated into a moral imperative. In fact, it is not under most rulebooks; think again about the lifeboat example, where we are not permitted to kill other inhabitants of the boat, even to ensure our own survival.

Lies and violence can be viewed similarly. Lies are never "necessary" and when applied to protect an important interest, like survival, never need to be elevated to the level of a morally acceptable choice. Our rulebooks, after all, are compilations of the ways we should behave. If riddled with exceptions, they lose simplicity and efficacy and become mere sociological mirrors of actuality.

Aren't there white lies? It is very hard to say what these are. Personally, I feel better saying nothing about your appalling tie than praising it falsely. Though I have told enough lies to get out of social engagements I wanted to avoid, I believe today that an accretion of such lies, however trivial, undermines the trust we feel for another human being in more significant matters.

It is hard to say that any lie is wholly beneficial or otherwise completely without consequences. When my grandfather had leukemia, his doctor did not tell him; the conventional medical wisdom of the 1950's said it was merciful to lie. In my opinion, he was robbed of the opportunity to navigate his life knowingly in the light of a major obstacle in the landscape. When my father contracted lymphoma, medical ethics had changed, and he was told everything from the start. When my own cancer arrives, I expect to be treated no differently.

A very common and trivial lie involves deceiving someone about which others possess certain information. Many, perhaps most, promises of confidentiality are deceptive because privately conditional: I have the mental reservation (which I do not communicate to you) that I will not tell anyone except my wife, or a friend whom I trust also to keep the secret.

I told a memorable lie of this type, which backfired. (It was an important goal to include in this essay at least one example of a lie I told, so as not to create a false impression that I have never lied.) Within a company, I was in an ambiguous situation of having two bosses: I was on loan from Boss 1 to Boss 2 (who did not want my help and regarded me as a spy for Boss 1.) Someone made a comment in internal email in Boss 2's group which I knew would anger Boss 1. I told Boss 1 about it in confidence. Boss 2 asked me if I had told anyone and I said no. I was uncomfortable with the question, which I certainly could have answered honestly, and I took the line of least resistance. Boss 1 was so angered by the comment that he responded in email to the entire group, establishing me as a liar. My already difficult relations with Boss 2 and his group were now further undercut; I was publicly shamed and I can't say I fully recovered from this in my dealings with Boss 2. Yet the lie, at the moment I told it, seemed a very trivial one. I thought it would never be detected, so there would be no consequences. Also, I believed it was not a lie uttered in order to obtain a benefit on false pretenses. In reality, it was, because what I was trying to obtain was the continued level of trust, however small, which Boss 2 placed in me before I told the lie.

Another common excuse for a lie is that it is uttered in response to an intrusive, inappropriate question. I probably thought Boss 2 really had no right to ask me what I had or hadn't told Boss

1. Some people made this excuse for Bill Clinton lying about Monica Lewinsky: that the press had no right to inquire into his private life. However, even if we claim a distinction (which I rejected above) between the moral implications of private and public behavior, this is a very weak excuse.

The President could have told the truth or refused to answer. It would be refreshing to hear a public figure say, "That's none of your damn business" once in a while. By lying, he did himself immense public damage, of which the impeachment trial was the most visible and expensive consequence.

Truth stands as an absolute value, the glue which binds the rulebook. "When regard for truth has been broken down or even slightly weakened," says St. Augustine (quoted by Bok), "all things will remain doubtful."

Lies and betrayal

Lies Between Couples

This week the topic is CHEATING. This is a topic that I have shied away from until now. I didn't want to air "dirty laundry" and I don't do it now for that reason. Someone told me they thought I should share my story…….to put a human face to the topic, if you will. This is a long story, but one I hope you will take the time to read until the end.

I have been divorced now for 6, almost 7 years. My marriage started as all do. We were young and happy. We thought we would be that way forever. As anyone who has ever been married knows, it isn't always the easiest road. We were not a good team. We were not able to make each other happy. We both held responsibility for bad decisions. We should have ended it early, but for reasons I won't elaborate on here, we both remained. Perhaps we thought we were doing what was expected of us or what was best for our kids. It doesn't really matter now.

1998 was a turning point for me. My grandfather had died in April of that year and it was a devastating blow to me. He was the person I was closest to in my life and my personal hero. Family was something my grandfather and I talked about a lot growing up. Family was everything to him. When he died, all I could think about is how disappointed he would be if we weren't a strong family unit. In the weeks and months that followed his death, my husband was incredibly supportive. During that time I once again saw the man I had fallen in love with. I was determined to make my marriage work and to hold on to my family.

My grandfather's birthday was in October and when it rolled around that year, it was a difficult week for me. I cried a lot. My husband would hold me and listen to me talk about how much I wanted our family to be something my grandfather would have admired. I even talked about how much I yearned to be like the elderly couple next door. Their love for each other was so obvious and had stood the test of time. I thought we were heading in a better direction. It was at this same time that one of our co-workers (we worked together) approached me and told me that a woman was calling my husband every night at work at the same time.

He said they would talk for long periods of time. He said he was worried and felt strange about telling me, but wanted me to know the truth. I stood in defense of my husband. I just knew that he would never do anything like that to me. I was sure he would leave me before he would ever cheat on me. I believed him when he told me it was his mother calling him each night. They talked often and that made sense to me.

There were subtle things that continued that I should have seen, but I had convinced myself that my husband would never do something so hurtful. Again my friend approached me. I got angry with him and drove a wedge into the friendship. I refused to believe anything he said.

In March of 1999, I had taken some time off from work. I was at home when my husband came in and told me we needed to talk. The look on his face scared me to the point that I couldn't breathe. I thought something horrible had happened to one of the kids. He was shaking and had tears in his eyes. It was then that he told me he had cheated on me. But if that were not heart-wrenching enough, he told me the woman was pregnant and was going to be demanding child support after the baby was born.

He told me that he had gone out that morning with his gun to kill himself, but he could not do that to our kids. As he continued to talk, cry, and to explain himself and his regret, I just sat there numb. I felt like I was in another world, listening to someone else talking and not hearing any of the words. It was just noise to me. What I later found out was that he had met this woman at a motorcycle rally. They did not sleep together then. They communicated for a while. She was 19 years old. Our son was 15 at the time.

How do you wrap your head around that ? Your husband is having a baby with another woman who is only 4 years older than your son. I couldn't comprehend it. I'm not sure why, but the most devastating blow for me was when I calculated when all of this occurred and realized it was at the time of my grandfather's birthday. Those were the times when I was laying in my husband's arms at night, telling him of my heartache in missing my grandfather, my dreams for our future, and feeling more loved by him than I ever had. To know that this wasn't a spontaneous act, but one that he spent time investing in was painful. It was almost more than I could bear.

To make a long story a little bit shorter, I let him stay in the house until school let out in May. I didn't want to disrupt my kid's lives during the end of the school year with exams pending, etc.. To say it was difficult is an understatement. I filed for divorce in May, but while undergoing counseling and going through the divorce proceedings, I was convinced by many people that I should give him another chance. I was convinced he had had a "mid-life crisis" and that he was truly remorseful. I know what you're thinking, but honestly, there were MANY people convinced of this other than myself.

I ended up taking him back not long after the baby was born. I stayed with him until 2002 when I could just not handle it any longer. I suspected he was cheating again. I was even told that he had done it five or six times during our marriage. I don't know the truth to this day, but I really don't care either. I filed for divorce and the rest is history. I don't hold any hatred towards him.

People always assume that I do. They mistake my bitterness about the way he has dealt with our children as hatred for what he did to me. Those are VERY separate issues. I won't make excuses for him. He was wrong, but maybe it was the only way he knew to extricate himself from the situation. I actually feel a little bit sorry for him because he has to live with the choices that he made every day for the rest of his life.

The only reason I share this now is because someone told me my story might be relevant in making others understand the damage that can be done. Of course there is anger and sadness, but it goes much deeper than that. There is a trust that is shattered that goes down to the core of everything you know about life and about yourself. You never believe that someone that loves you could hurt you so deeply.

I did confront my husband on numerous occasions and would question him about suspicions. Each time he would look me in the eyes and tell me I was being silly or that I was crazy. He would tell me he loved me and explain away things that I worried about. There were times I felt like I was going crazy. I wondered if my instincts were that wrong. I would feel guilt that I would question my own husband. The tables were turned often and he would make me feel like I was the evil one and he was the victim.

I would question what part of it was my fault. Did I drive him to do it ?? What did she have that I couldn't offer ? So many of those things cross your mind. How could I have believed that our marriage was better in those times when he was cheating than in the past ? Why couldn't I see what was happening ? Why wouldn't I believe someone who was telling me ?

There are also the unseen consequences. I have seen things that my daughter has written and listened to things my son has said. What my ex-husband didn't realize is that when he cheated, it wasn't just on me, but on our kids as well. My son was the first one who made that statement and it was an eye-opening experience for me. My daughter admits to having trust issues and being afraid that she won't ever really love a man because she is afraid of being hurt. She says she doesn't know if she really believes in love.

To hear those things is excruciating pain. Their lives weren't just changed in those months when we were going through the betrayal and the divorce, but for the rest of their lives. They carry emotional scars that may be with them forever. Things that I pray I have helped them with, but I can't make disappear.

Eventually you begin to heal with time, but some of the consequences of the betrayal lie deep within and sometimes you don't recognize how deep those scars reside. I needed to find myself after my divorce -- to work on me. I had absolutely no interest in dating. It was a wise decision. After the betrayal, I had put up HUGE walls.

I didn't know how to trust any more -- not others -- and not my own judgment and instincts. After the divorce, I was able to work through much of that emotion and start tearing down some of those walls, a little bit at a time. I still felt vulnerable, but I was much more at ease with those demons from past and I really got to know myself. I felt really strong again and I truly liked the person I was. I had found "myself" again.

I finally felt ready to date again, or so I thought. Subconsciously thou', if I was enjoying someone's company, I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I would find reasons to end it. It was easier to be single than to worry about having my heart broken again. I finally did grow weary of not trusting and always being afraid tho'. When I tell you that I worked hard on those issues, I doubt you will understand the lengths to which I went to rid myself of those demons. I truly believed I had finally overcome them completely.

I wish I could tell you that I am completely over those issues, but I learned recently (almost 7 years after the divorce and even longer after the affair) that despite the fact that I've come so far, there are still traces of those trust issues deep within me. Someone that I trusted and befriended for 20 years (and knew and had gone through my divorce with me) used those very issues to manipulate me for reasons of his own.

Because I had been a friend for so many years, my instinct wasn't to question him, but to think he was just being a caring friend. I couldn't even see that I was being manipulated. What I did instead was this: I questioned myself, what I believed in, whether or not my instincts were correct, or whether I was being naieve. One minute you can think clearly and know your instincts are on target and what you feel is real......and in the next minute you second guess everything you know.

You were conditioned to think that way and you don't even realize you are doing it. I began a cycle like that of a roller coaster -- up and down, and twisting and turning in agony. He triggered those responses in me without me even realizing it was occurring. As strange as it sounds, I found other things to blame my emotions on. It took me way too long to recognize what was happening. In the course of that time, I hurt someone I cared about very deeply. I can't take that back. I can only apologize and hope for forgiveness -- and that the person will have the capacity to realize the depth of the pain that brought me to those places.

I now struggle with the pain of hurting someone I cared about all because of those issues that I thought I had resolved so long ago. I was wrong. They were buried deep within me, and with the right triggers, came flooding back into my world. Perhaps not quite in the same way, but enough to make me question my own instincts and to doubt myself. All of these years later, I am now in a struggle with sadness of a different kind....but still because of trust issues stemming from the lies and betrayal of infidelity.

My heart hurts so heavily from the pain that I unwittingly brought to someone so dear, someone that I had trusted completely.....until those old triggers were manipulated by another for their own selfish reasons. I am ashamed, humiliated, and embarrassed that I could not see what was directly in front of my eyes. In that way, I feel very victimized......but mostly I feel pain.

So why do I share these ugly things with you so openly now ? Not because I want your sympathy, nor do I want empathy. I'm not asking anyone to hate my ex-husband. I don't stand in judgment of anyone either. We all make mistakes in our lives and I am no exception. We all have our crosses to bear, so I am not any more a victim than anyone else.

We all make choices for different reasons. I only share this with you to give you the perspective on how it changed lives in my world---- mine, that of my children, and both of our families. I know it changed my ex's world too. I have many friends that have dealt with infidelity in their lives as well. Each one of them can relay almost identical stories to me about the scars they carry.

My only goal here is to share. I would only ask that anyone that is dancing with the idea of cheating on a loved one, whether that be emotionally, physically, or both, please consider the long term consequences of what you might be doing. It may not be just the significant other that gets hurt. Victims can be many.

As I mentioned above, one of the victim's of my past is someone in my present that had absolutely nothing to do with what occurred. Of course, it should be said that this applies only to those "Cheating".

Perhaps that is not even a term we should use, but betraying your significant other. Each relationship has agreed upon or expected parameters going into it. If you have an open relationship and it is agreed upon, then you are not violating a trust.

You are only cheating or betraying someone when you are doing something that you wouldn't do openly in front of your loved one -- or if you are doing something without their knowledge and acceptance.

My words of advice to those that are miserable.........get out of a bad or unfulfilling relationship. Move on - without destroying yourself and others. It might seem harder to do initially, but it is the better alternative for everyone in the long run.

Trust is something that takes years to build, but it can be destroyed in seconds. I am still working to keep those issues out of my life. I will not give up on people, nor will I give up on love.

Personal relationships

With regard to human relationships, couples tend to expect sexual monogamy of each other. If so, then cheating commonly refers to forms of infidelity, particularly adultery.[5]. However, there are other divisions of infidelity, which may be emotional. Cheating by thinking of, touching and talking with someone you are attracted to may equally be as damaging to one of the parties.

Emotional cheating may be correlated to that of emotional abuse, which to date is treated as seriously in a court of law as physical cheating. With the expansion of understanding of other cultures, there is a wide spectrum of what cheating means.

When in a committed relationship, the definition of cheating is based on both parties opinions and both parties may redefine their understanding to match the party at an either lower or higher extreme of this definition. Some couples simply believe that cheating constitutes doing anything, whether verbal or physical, that one would not do in front of their significant other.

Such examples would include: expressing attraction to another person, electronic communications, kissing, making out, and sexual relations.

Many people consider cheating to be any violation of the mutually agreed-upon rules or boundaries of a relationship, which may or may not include sexual monogamy. For example, in some polyamorous relationships, the concepts of commitment and fidelity do not necessarily hinge on complete sexual or emotional monogamy.

Whether polyamorous or monogamous, the boundaries to which people agree vary widely, and sometimes these boundaries evolve within each relationship.