I Think You're Fat - Esquire
aja:
I still tell plenty of lies every day, but by the end of the week I’ve slashed the total by at least 40 percent. Still, the giddiness is wearing off. A life of radical honesty is filled with a hundred confrontations every day. Small, but they’re relentless.
“Yes, I’ll come to your office, but I resent you for making me travel.”
“My boss said I should invite you to this meeting, although it wouldn’t have occurred to me to do so.”
“I have nothing else to say to you. I have run out of conversation.”
My wife tells me a story about switching operating systems on her computer. In the middle, I have to go help our son with something, then forget to come back.
“Do you want to hear the end of the story or not?” she asks.
“Well…is there a payoff?”
“Fuck you.”
I’m fascinated (and amused) by this article. While I don’t think I would try to be completely honest about everything, I have been finding value in being more honest about things I used to lie about.
My boyfriend gave me some chocolate he brought back from a recent trip, and I tried it, but didn’t like it—it tasted too much like milk chocolate, and I’m a deep-dark-bitter fan. My first impulse was to lie and say I liked it, but I think if I’d lied, I would end up resenting the fact that I had three bars of chocolate lying around that I didn’t want to eat, but now felt like I must because Duncan got them for me. And I’ve been trying to be honest with him as much as I can, because I believe relationships suffer when the people in them stop being their authentic selves. If I can’t be myself with him, then what’s the point?
So I said, “I appreciate the gesture, but I don’t like the chocolate.” And he was like, “more for me!”
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