Honesty is NOT the best policy but conversations are helpful – thoughts on relationships

Coming from a priest that title may seem odd if not ironic. After all, is this not what one should hold on to? Is this not what should be advocated in a world that has made dishonesty is home and called it alternative facts? I am writing these thoughts specifically to address the issue of honesty in relationships. I am doing this not because a smart line crossed my imagination but simply because as complex as relationships are, I have come to believe that given certain circumstances, honesty is not the best policy.

Let me begin with my life learnings. I have been known to call a spade a spade and I use the past tense ’know’ with a certain sense of responsibility. On hindsight I think I was very brash years in the early years of my priesthood. I said what ‘I wanted’ to say rather than choose what needed to be said. Well. I did get a lot off my chest and I did feel I was being ‘transparent’ and not shady in my opinions. Diplomacy I thought was for diplomats, I was just expressing the need to say things as I saw them. I paid a price. You see, you may say this is not a matter of honesty but of discretion and yet I insist that brashness aside, the honest remarks made on several occasions did not go down well with even those I loved.

Life is not as simple as we would like it to be. While we may feel that an honest sharing of ‘everything’ is essential; while I sense the need to be transparent one hundred percent, the consequences are not as often as a religious admonition on honesty may be. There is a price to pay whether you shoot your mouth off or honestly express an opinion or level up with what gnaws at your soul. Ironically, instead of the reward that honesty purports you might end up paying a nasty price for what you consider an honest opinion. Sometimes sugar coating serves a purpose.

Am I advocating dishonesty in a relationship? Well, for starters, not everyone can handle a good measure of honesty, after all you were given a consolation prize and made to believe you won something when in reality you lost the race. So, the system devised a dishonest, sugar-coated way of dealing with what should have been an honest situation and told you to go home empty handed. Sadly, we grow looking for consolation prizes and think that life served us lemons for that passionate desire we had to plant a lemon tree.