Lying And Love,
All’s Fair In Love And War
Or Is It?
The Virgin Spring
Fall 2009
Lying And Love
The Virgin Spring
All’s Fair In Love And War Or Is It?
The Story Of Jennifer
Jennifer Meets a Man
Jennifer called me to talk about a horrible experience she had and was still going through.
Jennifer met a man. His story was that he had wanted to be with a particular woman, but as it turned out, she was living with another. So it was time for him to move on.
With this presumably behind them, he and Jennifer continued their relationship and were soon married. Jennifer’s new husband had two children. With her son from a previous marriage, they would be a family of five.
It felt like a perfect match.
Jennifer Builds Their House
Jennifer's house, which she had built
“with my own bare hands”
was big but needed to be expanded for all to be comfortable. So, digging deep into her savings, and getting a loan, Jennifer began construction on the house.1
The Other Woman
At the point when the house was in total disarray, Jennifer's new husband informed her that he was not entirely disengaged from the "other" woman. In addition, he initiated a court action for part of the house.
Jennifer was in shock. First, that her husband was still involved with this “other” woman. And second that he started costly legal proceedings for a portion of the house, that Jennifer had,
“completely financed on my own ...
and had in addition, “completely supported my husband while he recovered from a back injury”.
They Part
Jennifer took a leave of absence from her work, and with her son went to visit her family. She spoke with her husband by phone. They reconciled and she returned home hoping to heal and complete what they had started.
Jennifer Experiences Collapse
After she returned, they continued to talk. In one of their ongoing conversations in which assurances were being asked for, he said, that if he "has to choose, it will have to be the other women."
Jennifer felt the experience of collapse.
Her "heart went crazy" . . . "like a stroke" . . .her whole "right side of her body was gone".
Jennifer was in a "life and death struggle". Except for some possible tragedy to her son, this "was the greatest betrayal of my life" and" I had to walk through that by myself".
The Birth Of a Sanctuary
Jennifer has been in mourning, deeply grieving. Now, however, on her own, she's completing her house. The experience she went through had awakened in her spiritual feelings that she “had forgotten about.” Maybe, she says, “the house will become a sanctuary.”
"The Virgin Spring"
The depth of feeling communicated by Jennifer, the image of her building her house with her own bare hands, the description of how the pain she suffered had reawakened dormant spiritual feelings, led my thoughts and feelings to Ingmar Bergman’s, The Virgin Spring.
The Virgin Spring was one of Ingmar Bergman’s2 most inspiring films. In it he leads us through a labyrinth of black and white contrasts of innocence and evil. Right to that powerful moment in the film when Max von Sydow, the father, vows to build a church on the very spot that his innocent murdered daughter now lies. It is at that moment in the film, that moment of his vow, that moment when he moves to lift his daughter’s head from the forest floor, it is at that moment that we experience the miraculous, water from a spring begins to gently flow from the place where the murdered innocent girl was lying.
It is this, the witnessing of the miraculous, and the transformation of suffering and pain into a sanctuary that gives us hope. That is what I thought I heard Jennifer say when she said, “maybe the house will be a sanctuary”
Do We Just “Fall In Love” or Do We Decide?
Unless we’ve been struck, blindsided by Cupid’s arrow, love is a decision.3 Once we have decided to open our heart, we have made the leap across a chasm and it is very difficult to reverse course.
It is during the “decision phase” of falling in love that we are going to need to assess the information we are being provided with. Assess whether we are being lied to. Before we decide to go the next leap.
This is a process, an ongoing process of evaluation in long term relationships. As “reality” and new realities get clearer, the issue of lying comes up. Was I lied to, deceived? Or did I just not “see” what was right in front of my eyes? Did I see but actively ignore what I saw? Am I to blame for being in this situation? Who is to blame? Me or You? Should I move on to the next step, have children, buy the house? or get out now.
This “in or out” issue relates to InnerRESOURCES Idea #7.
When should we give up?
Give up our individual will
and way of doing things.
When should we "lose ourselves”,
by surrendering to our relationship,
family, and community.
And when should we simply
give up the relationship
because we would lose ourselves
and gain nothing greater in return.
Part 2
Why Are We Being Lied To?
Why Are We Lying To Each Other?
Thou Shalt Not Lie is one of the Ten Commandments. But from my quick perusal of the scientific literature, it appears that modern science is just beginning to take lying as an issue seriously. Some research trends of note are the developmental analysis of lying, lying and moral development, lying and empathy. And training manuals on “How To Spot A Liar”
Lying, Deception, and Camouflage
Deception and camouflage, “shape-shifting” and blending has been thought of as a survival mechanism in nature. The chameleon is often cited as a metaphor for humans who blend easily into different social environments suggesting they have no real position on anything except perhaps to survive or accomplish some mission.4 The concept of the chameleon is seen in literature, especially in the spy genre, popularized, for example in the Bourne series5. Deception sits well, feels at home so to speak, with humans at war and we'd expect it to be part of a warrior or military or Darwinian survival of the fittest mindset.
Lying And Deception And The Search For Love
One just has to ask, what does Darwin have to do with, or what is it about love or the desperate need to find love that allows us to give ourselves permission to use an “any means necessary” or a warrior, survival “kill or be killed” mentality to “get it”? Whether it’s posting phony online profiles on dating services. Or tricking and seducing others into getting what we want, including radically altering our appearance sexually and otherwise.
It is a long way from the scenario of a frail potential victim acting deceptively to survive against a horrific predator to the portrayal of sexual deception as described by Wendy Doniger and in the film Boys Don't Cry.
Is It Love or War or Love and War
Now I do understand that there is an expression “battle between the sexes” or is it “war between the sexes” which acknowledges that there is a war going on here. See “War Of The Roses” And perhaps that is one reason for so much lying and deception in the arena of “love”. Lovers are at war, for territory, how to have sex and how to raise the children, bank accounts, retirement funds homes and properties, as well as a way of viewing the world. You name it. It’s a war. This “war” and it’s shape-shifting strategies and associated expressions, such as “Who are you!”, is most definitely a separate strand from the love experience we were hoping for.
Cynically, at the bottom-line we might ask, does it all reduce to the same warrior predator impulse of conquest, domination and control. “Ah, hah, Got you, Now you are mine. I’m on top.” or perhaps an even more primitive cannibalistic throwback of the evolution of the species, “I can eat you digest my experience of you and spit out what remains of you and move on”. 6
Quite a different view from that of the beautific, “I-Thou” that Martin Buber talks about, where merging with the other as compared to the rational and analytic breakdown of your positives and negatives, is an entirely different way of getting to “know about” you.
The idea that “love” allows for another arena for war, and allows it’s participants to be extremely vulnerable to domination and cannibalistic experiences is not as popular as the idea that love is a look at all that is good in the world, a door to the supernatural, a brushing up against the sacred.
The complexity and multifaceted dimensions associated with the word love, spanning our life from infancy to old age, embedded in the essential mysteries of life itself, suggest that we begin to modify our cultural education and propaganda machine regarding this experience.
Wendy Doniger
The Bed Trick
Wendy Doniger (Doniger, 1996) describes the issue in great detail, with special attention to the lying, “trickery” and deception involved in sexual, romantic love.
“PEOPLE all over the world tell this story about sexual lying: you go to bed with someone you think you know, and when you wake up you discover that it was someone else--another man, or another woman, or a man instead of a woman, or a woman instead of a man, . . . The plot seems to have fascinated people of many cultures and should make it onto anyone's list of the Ten Greatest Hits of World Mythology. It is at the heart of what Shakespearean scholars call "the bed trick"
which of course involves a switch of some kind, a deception. You’ve seen it in the movies, the rotating bedroom scene where a man crawls in bed with someone he thinks is A and it turns out to be B, and they both jump sky high after some sweet talk and fondling. Or the late night movie with the scene where the wife is blindfolded while making love and the husband quietly slips away only to be replaced by some stranger. Or the massage scene where the masseuse is switched either from the beautiful woman to the huge, fat ugly one or the deadly killer in the Bond films or any imaginable variation thereof. Wendy Doniger examines the possibilities and rational in literature and the arts.
Boys Don’t Cry
It is in Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce Director: October 1999 (Canada) that we experience the deep, deep anguish and desperation of a woman, Brandon (played by Hilary Swank) who doesn’t just want to be a man but appears to believe she is a man, “I’m not a dyke”.7
Where is Darwin8 as Brandon stuffs the Dildo down her pants and has sex with her unsuspecting lover, Lana (Chloë Sevigny) who with eyes rolled back doesn’t seem to know the difference. And then, so in love, when she visits her in jail says
“I don’t care what you are.”
It is against a backdrop of personal pain and cultural intolerance and rage, against the backdrop of “hate crimes in America”, that at a personal level we see the main character self righteously seduce and deceive a number of women with the final seduction of Lana (Chloë Sevigny) in Falls City, Nebraska leading to the final scene of horrific mouth open jaw dropping disbelief that they are actually going to kill her/him because they were tricked!9
Lying And Love At The Movies10
Lying, deception and love is an ongoing theme “at the movies”. Here are just a very few that got my attention in past years.
The movie Masquerade depicts lying on a love and larger scale with somewhat more personal effects than those of the cool aloof psychopathic Bond films, significantly updated in La Femme Nikita.
The “Double” has a long history in fiction and mythology, but Jeremy Irons moves us into the perverse in his role as “the Doctor” in Dead Ringers.
Moon Over Parador combines the essentials of Masquerade and the deception possibilities of the double to turn the “Affairs of State” into just another media event. Actors, doubles, and a cast of characters with no morality and no connection to reality.11 More recently the use of presidential doubles is “admitted to” in Vantage Point.
Woody Allen characterizes the personality type, the blending chameleon, in his deadly serious comedy Zelig.
For a look at the betrayal of the young idealist military sniper by his leaders see Shooter, penned by Stephen Hunter.
For a longer, more exhaustive analysis and list of deception and trickery at the interpersonal-romantic-sexual level with full analysis of the cultural philosophy which supports all kinds of lies and trickery, including the “bed trick”, see (Doniger, 1996).
Truth Heals and May Even Cure
Lies may protect and may be used to get what we want, but, at some point, truth is cure both at the level of the patient in psychoanalysis and for the nation.
Spotnitz (1985) used to say (see also, Landau (1992), and Gediman & Lieberman, 1996)12 that in the psychoanalytic situation if the patient lies back and talks about everything, and is honest, he/she has no choice but to get cured.
"it was an amazing discovery for me to realize . . . that the person who comes to my office . . . agrees to tell me everything, has no choice but to improve
He has to improve, has to get better, there is no freedom in this situation.
He has surrendered his will power. If he makes reservations, if he does not agree to say everything, if he intends to hide things, lie or deceive the analyst or lie and deceive the group then the therapy won't work." ( p.8)
Alcoholics Anonymous Agrees
The Ability To Be Honest Is Essential For Cure
The only requirement for membership is an honest desire to stop drinking.....
RARELY HAVE we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give them- selves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average.
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Cited
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, The Anonymous Press PDF Edition, http://anonpress.org/pdf/
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, (2001) 4th Edition of “The Big Book”, Kindle Edition
Bergman, Ingmar, Isaksson, Ulla (1960). The Virgin Spring.
Buber, M., trans,by R.G. Smith (1955). I and Thou (2nd ed.).
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons
Doniger, W. (1996). Sex, Lies and Tall Tales. Social Research , 63 (3). Retrieved from Ebsco Host, Academic Search Premier
Ekman, P. (1997). Lying And Deception, Chapter 14. In N. P. Stein, Memory for Everyday and Emotional Events. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Ekman, P. a. (1991). Who Can Catch A Liar. American Psychologist , 46 (9), 913-920.
Gediman, H. P., & Lieberman, J. S. (1996). Many Faces of Deceit: Omissions, Lies and Disguise In Psychotherapy. New York, New York: Jason Aronson.
Masson, J. M. (1984) The Assault On Truth: Freud's Suppression Of The Seduction Theory. Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The President's Analyst [Motion Picture] Flicker, T. J. (Director). (1967).
Landau, Jeff (November, 2001). The Freedom To Talk [8 Ideas Newsletter. New York, New York, USA]. http://www.innerresources.org/TheFreedomToTalk.pdf