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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

Most common reason why i lie: Working around other people's thinking.

A common lie is that I'm in a relationship with my "girlfriend". In truth we just live together in a flat, spend some time together for some needs, but are otherwise independent persons. If i say we are together, people draw wrong conclusions. If i say we are just flatmates, people draw wrong conclusions.

With people projecting their own ideas of the world onto everything, truthful talking stops being useful. So i fall back to replaying some common stereotypes so people don't bother me anymore and let me do my own stuff.

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I'm confused. There are terms for what you are describing. If the relationship is also sexual then you're friends with benefits. If it is not than you are friends/roommates.

I guess its a bit strange to say, "They are not my girlfriend, we're friends with benefits" but if your goal isnt to lie then... That comes with a price of being awkward at times. Like OP's example of when their sig other asks if X looks good on them.

The honest answer is not always the easiest one.

I also don't understand GP's comment and am curious about this non-girlfriend flatmate situation.

I guess that's exactly what the GGP wants to avoid explaining by pretending the roommate is the girlfriend :P

Then you get their reasoning perfectly! I use "SO" online, but we're financially independent cohabitating partners because our state doesn't recognize domestic partnerships. If I say "fiance" then I have to answer when we're getting married (we aren't), and if I say "girlfriend" or "roommate", it doesn't convey that we are each other's beneficiaries, emergency contacts, requests for power of attorney, etc, so I just use her name and leave out the relationship in conversations altogether.

I was surprised to discover how common this was after I tried to explain and found out many of the couples we knew and worked with who are "married" aren't.

I hear partner often to describe this sort of relationship. Sure that work?

Problem is, people want simple answers, and i don't always have simple answers worked out for them, nor do i want to spend much time doing that.

> when their sig other asks if X looks good on them

This is some stereotype, which doesn't happen for me. This is what i meant with "drawing wrong conclusions".

I don't feel like this is lying ir false speech or anything. I am from the suburbs of a medium sized city but distinctly not from that city, as my home is across across the river and in a different state. Still when I travel and people ask "where are you from?" answering that I'm from that city is the easiest way to give the correct picture. Someone making polite conversation doesn't want to hear this explanation, if I'm chatting with an Uber driver I'll just say the city because it's easier, if I'm making new friends I would explain. I don't think there is any lie in either explanation it's just different shades of a communication in a world full of non-binary situations.

Are you from Cincinnati / Covington area?. That's the first place that came to mind based on "across the river and in a another state"

There are tons of these places: New York, Portland, Memphis, St Louis. Major rivers tend to be state lines as well as population centers.

That's true, I'm probably just betraying my bias from my own home state by what comes to mind first :)

Actually you were right, I am talking about NKY/Cincinnati

Hah! My Ohio bias pays off for a change!

There's also the entire rest of the world, of which the US is ~ 5% of ;).

This can be compatible with my approach of not lying. I think as long as it's the least misleading way to answer the question then it's ok in most casual cases.

I've been having this myself just having moved to Texas. People ask where we're from and we most recently moved from California but my wife and I both have a long history of living in many places. I feel people want a simple answer but it's hard to give one that gives them the right idea.

“We’ve moved a lot, so not really anywhere — but most recently California.”

People can then take the easy fact, ask more about California, or ask about other places if they genuinely care.

Individually, words are very crude low resolution descriptors. English is actually pretty nuanced because we've inherited so many words for the same things form different languages, and assigned them slightly different meanings, but it's still a big problem. I notice this particularly in discussions relating to philosophy, people very often talk right past each other because they're assuming different meanings of the words they're using.

I wouldn’t say that’s lying, just an somewhat inaccurate simplification… language is always spoken in a shared context that, like Huffman encoding, assigns short terms to common situations (wife, girlfriend, flatmate) and things outside those common situations may require more tokens to express accurately.

[Redacted: please practice self control, lay down your screens, walk barefoot on the grass, you need to disengage]

You only need to be around kids for a few minutes to realize why we are so flawed as human beings and why some of us fail to learn even the most basic life lessons.

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