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My first wife was a pathological liar. I'm bad at reading people and tend to think the best of people, so I remained naive (or willfully blind) to it for a lon

My first wife was a pathological liar. I'm bad at reading people and tend to think the best of people, so I remained naive (or willfully blind) to it for a long time. It came to a head when a sweet, mutual friend of ours asked an innocent question about what we were doing later in the day, and my (now ex-) wife gave a completely made up answer. It wasn't a white lie to get out of something, or a deflection to keep privacy, it was simply a pointless falsehood clearly produced on reflex. She was good at keeping track of who she told what lie, so this was the first time I'd been the 3rd party observer to something I could definitively know she was lying about. I confronted her about it later privately, "<name> is our friend, why would you lie to her for no reason?" and she gave a dismissive non-answer. That was the first loose thread that unraveled the whole sweater. It turned out she'd been lying to me and everyone close to her, about things big and small, for many years. It's difficult for me to understand the psychology behind it, but I think it comes down to she feels alternately safer and superior when she knows some truth that someone else doesn't know. Her parents are estranged but stayed together, constantly low-key gas lighting each other. Maybe growing up in that environment is why she reflexively lies. Or maybe it's heritable and the lying leads to that kind of relationship. Either way, I wasn't going to live the same way and peaced out.

api 6y ago
Was she abused physically, emotionally, or sexually? The constant low level gaslighting and other things witnessed may count. I have read that children who are abused can develop these traits as a defense mechanism or as a symptom of low grade dissociative identity disorder.
rrrrrrrrrrrr 6y ago
Based on what some others have said I think you got it at the end there: the feeling of power over others when you know something they don't. Maybe tackling ones own insecurities and fears is the key to being comfortable enough to tell the truth most of the time.
oceanghost 6y ago
I had the same problem with one more level of abstraction: My wife didn't know she was lying. My ex-wife lied about everything, and like you it took me years to figure it out. Everything was always someone else's fault (it was my fault she couldn't work, my fault she didn't clean, my fault she didn't cook), she often rearranged the order of events or even fabricated events in their entirety. Like you, I caught her mother in a bizarre "lie" that unraveled the thing. On XMas eve her mother called very hurt that we hadn't come over for out "traditional Xmas eve." She explained that we just always came over so she didn't think to call and make sure we were coming. The fact is, I have spent every XMas eve with my own family, we have a tradition of having a party on XMas eve, and I have only missed it once due to being hospitalized. You have to understand the sheer madness of this. She imagined that we were going to come over, convinced herself that we had always done so, and that there was no reason to even let us know she expected us. This set off alarm bells in my head, I could see that my wife was remembering things that didn't happen or altering events in her head and this was why we could never talk about anything or reach any common ground because we couldn't agree on ground truth. Eventually I found out she had suffered some trauma, and as a result something called "confabulation" which is more or less a unreliable/false memory.
klyrs 6y ago
My ex-spouse was a chronic liar, too. When they first told me about being gaslit by their family, I knew to be cautious. What I didn't understand at the time was that I'd implicitly agreed to never challenge them on a lie. As years went by, I noticed a tendency to "fish story" everything. What was weird is that I'd remember something very clearly, like we ran for 4 miles or whatever, and as I listened them retell the story, it would be 5, 6, 9 miles, growing with each retelling. When challenged, they'd act surprised as if they truly believed it, and simply misremembered. Sometimes, they'd try to convince me that I was the one with the faulty memory. Shit, who's gaslighting who here? This turned into a big problem after the honeymoon period. It took me a very long time to figure out that they would hear me say something, interpret it as an attack, and then deduce that I was attacking them for a certain purpose. Then they'd challenge me on attacking for whatever purpose, I'd be like "I don't remember doing anything like that" and they'd accuse me of gaslighting. Whatever their true beliefs, I was being gaslit through this "fish story" cycle. We tried counseling for years, and I eventually broke it off after it became clear that they weren't going to miraculously start a good faith approach to our relationship. I planned the end of our relationship around a significant life event of theirs -- I didn't want to fuck that up, and I had patience. The morning of my planned departure, the day after their big thing, I learned that the whole fucking thing was a lie -- they admitted that they wanted me to be impressed, so they fish story'd that too. To this day, I don't understand that moment of honesty. They suspected that I was on the way out, and when... maybe it was guilt, maybe it was a hail mary... but what I do know is that they were conscious and deliberate about that lie, I'd never trust an answer to the question, and I'm glad they're out of my life

api 6y ago

Was she abused physically, emotionally, or sexually? The constant low level gaslighting and other things witnessed may count. I have read that children who are abused can develop these traits as a defense mechanism or as a symptom of low grade dissociative identity disorder.

rrrrrrrrrrrr 6y ago

Based on what some others have said I think you got it at the end there: the feeling of power over others when you know something they don't. Maybe tackling ones own insecurities and fears is the key to being comfortable enough to tell the truth most of the time.

oceanghost 6y ago

I had the same problem with one more level of abstraction: My wife didn't know she was lying. My ex-wife lied about everything, and like you it took me years to figure it out. Everything was always someone else's fault (it was my fault she couldn't work, my fault she didn't clean, my fault she didn't cook), she often rearranged the order of events or even fabricated events in their entirety. Like you, I caught her mother in a bizarre "lie" that unraveled the thing. On XMas eve her mother called very hurt that we hadn't come over for out "traditional Xmas eve." She explained that we just always came over so she didn't think to call and make sure we were coming. The fact is, I have spent every XMas eve with my own family, we have a tradition of having a party on XMas eve, and I have only missed it once due to being hospitalized. You have to understand the sheer madness of this. She imagined that we were going to come over, convinced herself that we had always done so, and that there was no reason to even let us know she expected us. This set off alarm bells in my head, I could see that my wife was remembering things that didn't happen or altering events in her head and this was why we could never talk about anything or reach any common ground because we couldn't agree on ground truth. Eventually I found out she had suffered some trauma, and as a result something called "confabulation" which is more or less a unreliable/false memory.

klyrs 6y ago

My ex-spouse was a chronic liar, too. When they first told me about being gaslit by their family, I knew to be cautious. What I didn't understand at the time was that I'd implicitly agreed to never challenge them on a lie. As years went by, I noticed a tendency to "fish story" everything. What was weird is that I'd remember something very clearly, like we ran for 4 miles or whatever, and as I listened them retell the story, it would be 5, 6, 9 miles, growing with each retelling. When challenged, they'd act surprised as if they truly believed it, and simply misremembered. Sometimes, they'd try to convince me that I was the one with the faulty memory. Shit, who's gaslighting who here? This turned into a big problem after the honeymoon period. It took me a very long time to figure out that they would hear me say something, interpret it as an attack, and then deduce that I was attacking them for a certain purpose. Then they'd challenge me on attacking for whatever purpose, I'd be like "I don't remember doing anything like that" and they'd accuse me of gaslighting. Whatever their true beliefs, I was being gaslit through this "fish story" cycle. We tried counseling for years, and I eventually broke it off after it became clear that they weren't going to miraculously start a good faith approach to our relationship. I planned the end of our relationship around a significant life event of theirs -- I didn't want to fuck that up, and I had patience. The morning of my planned departure, the day after their big thing, I learned that the whole fucking thing was a lie -- they admitted that they wanted me to be impressed, so they fish story'd that too. To this day, I don't understand that moment of honesty. They suspected that I was on the way out, and when... maybe it was guilt, maybe it was a hail mary... but what I do know is that they were conscious and deliberate about that lie, I'd never trust an answer to the question, and I'm glad they're out of my life