People should own their messes

Delta Milayo Ndou
IT is paradoxical that the truth hurts and simultaneously, one’s heart is always safer in the custody of a partner who is unflinchingly honest. It takes a great deal of emotional courage to be straightforward in a relationship.

For the greater part, deception is preferred over honesty because honesty is so messy and hard and costly. I will explain myself. Honesty is messy because it shatters the fantasy and lays bare ugly truths and flaws, whereas lies often allow one to blissfully build castles in the air.

Honesty is hard because it often entails disclosing unpleasant or hard-to-swallow facts about one’s past, present and so-called ‘‘baggage’’. Honesty is costly because very few people can stomach the imperfections of others and usually the fear is that one gets dumped for making a truthful disclosure whereas a lie keeps them safe from rejection.

There are some people whose superpower is honesty. I mean they will tell you like it is, as it is and you have to take it or leave it. I regard it as the highest sign of integrity and respect to have someone ‘‘come clean’’ and at least allow you to make informed decisions about a relationship so that you know what you are signing up for from the word go.

Telling the truth is not easy because it involves exposing oneself, risking rejection and making yourself vulnerable. Lying in relationships is all too common and sometimes the most damaging lies are lies of commission — the things that should have been disclosed but weren’t. The longer one waits to disclose certain vital information, the harder it gets to do so and before they realise it — deception is the fabric of the relationship. Think of women that do not disclose that they have children and go to the extent of marrying someone who doesn’t even know that they are marrying someone who is a mother.

I think the existence of a child is something too serious to hide from your partner. It is neither fair nor reasonable to say, “well, I was never asked about it, so I saw no reason to disclose it”. Surely, somewhere in the “getting to know each other” stage of the relationship, one’s narration of their life story cannot omit an event as major as giving birth to a child? I equally do not understand families that will also conspire to hide such a thing.

You hear of cases where a child grows up thinking their birth mother is a sibling or aunt or random relative while the rest of the clan shamelessly participates in the sham. It is just so disrespectful to the man who lands in such a web of deceit — disrespectful and cruel. The harm done to the child cannot be overstated — why is it so hard to just tell the truth rather than build a relationship or marriage on a foundation of lies?

There are many men of course, who are equally guilty of the same. It is emotionally brutal to have a wife find out her husband had other kids during the course of their marriage, when those kids show up at her husband’s funeral — to the ready embrace of family members who knew and were complicit in concealing the matter. How do you do that to someone, surely?

It makes the wife feel like her whole marriage was a lie, that her whole relationship with her husband was falsehood — and she was the fool for believing in it. To make matters worse, there is no closure for a woman caught in such a situation because the husband is dead and she cannot confront him to demand an explanation, to get much-needed answers. The likelihood is the husband would have lied to ‘‘keep the peace’’ at home because being honest would have caused a mess that he wouldn’t have wanted to deal with.

But, really, people should own their messes. That’s the honourable thing to do, as far as I’m concerned. I have repeatedly assured my siblings that they can absolutely never rely on me to keep damaging secrets from their spouses — I will not be party to malicious deception — it is so abhorrent.

Then of course you have that common brigade of deception-mongers. The married men who will pretend to not be married and string someone along without disclosing their marital status. The lies never end and you will find people that bend over backwards to woe someone whom they have no intention or capacity to commit to maritally because they are already married.

Why can’t you just let people’s children be? You just hope that the karma that is coming to such men does the requisite press-ups in order to deal them a harsh blow from which they will never recover — those cruel devils.

Then there are those people who will get into a relationship and not disclose their HIV-positive status until they transmit the virus to an unsuspecting sexual partner whose only crime is to be too trusting and not press for couples’ HIV testing and counselling prior to being intimate.

For all the cases I have singled out above — there are people who choose to be brutally honest from the very beginning. It is as though truth-telling is their superpower and no matter how much making the disclosure hurts them or hurts the recipient of their message — these people will tell the truth and nothing but.

So as we navigate the maze of relationships and as we all work towards sparing ourselves heartache and pain — I hope the good Lord, the ancestors, the Heavens or whichever deity is merciful makes sure you encounter people who would rather hurt you with the truth than deceive you with lies. And may decency grant you the emotional courage and integrity to be a teller of the truth as you relate with others. The truth always comes out anyway, make it less messy by coming clean, it will earn you a bit of respect down the line.

Parting shot: A broken heart is one of those experiences that all of us as humans can share, yet you can only experience alone.

(Written as part of the #SaveManqoba fundraising campaign. This article was sponsored by a #Heartbreaks fan. #SundayNewsSolidarity).