Lives change in moments of truth when we stop lying to ourselves

By David McElroy · September 5, 2017

I looked across the table at Nicole’s face. I was intimately familiar with every single bit of her beautiful face. We had dated for several years and we were engaged to be married. But I suddenly saw her as though it was for the first time.

“I can’t marry you,” I thought to myself. “I absolutely can’t marry you. We’re not right for each other.”

I had known this for a long time, but I had been lying to myself. On the surface, Nicole was everything I could want. She was a tall, beautiful and well-educated woman from the Midwest. She had moved to Birmingham because she loved me and wanted a future with me.

I had been lying to myself about her for quite some time. After I broke up with her early in the relationship and she begged me to give us another chance, I relented — even though I knew better. When she told me she wanted to move down here for us to date full time, I didn’t promise her anything, but I also didn’t tell her what I knew — that it wouldn’t work.

After we dated for awhile, I found myself engaged to marry her. She wanted it very much and I didn’t seem to have a better alternative. I gave her a ring — which made her happy — but I knew better.

On that night in a restaurant — 10 years ago this month — I finally stopped lying to myself. I don’t know what it was about that moment, but something changed. As I stared at her beautiful face, I simply knew that my charade had to end. For the sake of both of us, I couldn’t marry this woman.

I broke off the engagement and we’ve gone separate ways. She’s happily married to someone else now and I’m happy for her. I have nothing bad to say about her, but I’m very happy I didn’t marry her.

With every positive major change in my life, there has been such a moment.

You see, I’m very good at lying to myself. When I know what I want, I can convince myself I’ll have it if I just wait long enough. And if I’m afraid to change something which I know is wrong for me, I’m good at convincing myself that things will somehow turn out fine if I’ll ignore what should be obvious.

One of the most horrifying realizations of adult life is that we are our own worst enemies. Other people might lay the foundations for our mistakes and disasters, but we’re almost always the ones who pull the trigger for these self-inflicted wounds.

When I look back at the things I’ve learned, I can see the ways in which my childhood left me ill-prepared for making emotionally healthy decisions in some cases, but with every single one of the major mistakes I’ve made along the way — the mistakes which fill me with regret today — I find they were all within my own power to change.

When I’ve made mistakes, I can almost always point to one moment when I made a decision that led me to somewhere I regretted.

There are moments when I’ve given up on something or someone I wanted when I shouldn’t have. There are moments when I’ve let fear keep me from attempting something I wanted to do. But there are moments when I’ve done the right thing — quit lying to myself — and made the right decision. It’s not always obvious in the moment which moments are which.

The common thread, though, is that there’s always a moment when I’m facing a choice between two paths. In retrospect, the right choice is always obvious. In the moment, fear and indecision can make things look confusing.

I’m more aware than ever lately of those brief moments of decision which change everything.

I have a feeling some more of those moments are coming for me soon. I’ve had to make some painful changes lately and I know the path I’m on isn’t sustainable in an emotional sense. Something has to change. I keep telling myself I can keep living the way I’m living — but I know I’m lying to myself.

Whether I like it or not, I’m approaching one of those moments of decision when everything will change. I don’t know what the decision will be, but I feel it coming.

Self-deception is a terrible thing. Admitting truth and making the right changes — however painful they are — is the only way to change a life and redeem lost hope. I just hope when that moment comes this time, I’ll be able to have the courage to stop lying to myself — and make whatever change I need to make right now.

Note: The name in this article has been changed from the actual woman’s name.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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