No one will disagree with the notion that honesty is a good thing. The right thing. The respectful thing. The fair thing. And so honesty has become THE thing. Honesty is fair and respectful and since we have a natural aversion to its opposite, dishonesty, particulalry deception, we grip honesty tightly and hold it up as a virtue. Fair enough. This stands to reason. And so honesty takes on this regal quality. I’m talking about it here as a widely held ideal, not as a widely observed praxis. Obviously. Because honesty, especially when you want it, is still rare.

Ok, well what about in romance? How does our esteemed honesty and openness fare as an approach? It should yield good things, right? Well, it kind of depends on the rate in which it is delivered. And we’ll get to that in time. The issue I want to talk about first is how we use honesty to rationalise our urges to ourselves or to our friends.

“Patrick, explain what you mean by urges. What kinds of things are you referring to?” Ok a few very common examples:

• A guy goes gaga shortly after meeting a gal and can’t help himself, feels compelled to divulge the extent of his feelings at this early stage in full momentum through some kind of awkward way that feels right to him.
• A woman feels that it’s only “fair” and open to inform a potential suitor on a first date that marriage and kids would have to be future options for him.
• A guy meets a gal at a lounge and tries to impress her by over-selling himself and his car or his job, not realising that his pitch is actually telegraphing the opposite: lower relative value.
• After living with her boyfriend for a few years, sans progress in the direction of marriage, a woman feels that the time has come to confront him. So she sits him down to have the Talk, and delivers an ultimatum: marry me or it’s over.

We’re all subject to these kinds of urges where we feel inexplicably compelled to get to the point and express our up-to-the-minute emotional state and try to force an issue. The examples above share the the same quality: openness. Each is an honest expression of personal feelings Or a forthright action in a direct bee-line to our desire outcome. Honest. Each is coming from a place of cold, hard straight-forwardness.

And each is an exhibit of a lack of art or tact. Because though this kind of directness may feel in our gut like the right thing to do, on the receiving end, each of these feels like too much, too soon. It feels like you’re being pushed. Rather than lead.

You mentioned rationalisation

We’re driven by the gut to follow through on these kinds of urges, impatient urges. I’ve been there myself. Many times. Many embarrassing times. And even though the rational mind may be telling us that following our gut will not yield the results we want, we don’t listen. We MUST follow our gut. We must follow through. The gut, the instinct almost always wins these kinds of internal battles. The reptilian mind is very powerful, very stubborn and very primitive. It has no use or respect for romance or art or the dance. It relies only on force. And it’s not pretty. And it pushes people away. And so once we’ve fallen victim to it, given in and fallen into our familiar pattern of fail, we feel we have to justify our impulsive, impatient, artless behaviour. So we pull the honesty card: we’ll tell ourselves and our friends that we were just being honest. We were the one operating on the higher plane because we were acting in accordance with the higher law: good old honesty. Sounds good, right? Pretty clever cover-up. Who can fault adherence to honesty? So we leverage honesty’s virtue to justify our inability to conquer our reptilian. Complex, our need to make sense to ourselves. We’re driven by the reptilian, but refuse to admit it.

Bluntly

Honesty is the bluntest of instruments in an art that often requires the most deft and subtle of movements, a fine touch. Success in romance is almost always a function of, to some degree, self control, controlling and resisting our basic urge to do something that will push the other person away. And this is because humans are pre-programmed to be reluctant to give up certain parts of ourselves, specifically, the part that the other half instinctively wants. Our built-in sales resistance for certain things is very high and the hard sell triggers our shut-down response. Directness and openness is not the process by which people part with that which we are instinctively cautious to part with. There’s a sequence, a slowness, a dance. “A” to “B” is most certainly the longest path, and you’d be lucky if you ever actually reach “B”. The more effective way to get “B” on your side is to lead “B” to “C”.

In 1995 I worked at Tiffany and as much as I would have loved to cut to the chase to make the sale – e.g. “Do you want to buy it or not?” – buyers preferred to be seduced; they wanted the story, they want to be lead and romanced into the sale at a rate much slower than what I wanted. But if you dump the decision in the buyer’s lap, you transfer the power of choice which kills the desire and chills the buying temperature. I could pull the honesty defense and claim that bluntness in my expression of MY desire would be the far more accurate and fair(?) representation of my impatience to finish the sale. But who cares. The buyer already knows my desire. For me to remind her does not inspire her to provide it. In fact it would serve the opposite. So then… pregnant pause… the party that wants a certain result is the party that holds the incentive to get out of their own head, and stop forcing their desires onto their target. Falling back on honesty to post-rationalise force is cover up for artless game.