OPINION
Eamonn Holmes has hit upon a home truth (Image: Getty)
Let’s hear it for lying. I don’t mean big lies, about money or marital status or criminality, but just the little ones that keep life turning over.
If you meet a friend who looks as if she’s been dragged through a hedge backwards, is it going to make her feel better if you tell the truth about her appearance? Of course not.
It will just introduce a sour note into the evening and you’ll probably shortly afterwards find yourself down one friend.Eamonn Holmes is the latest to admit this: on television this week, he disputed a dating coach’s assertion that lying breaks trust in a relationship: “Does my bum look big in this? No of course it doesn’t,” he said, adding that he also embellished the truth about himself.
Taken to extremes of course, this is destructive and potentially shattering, but just to smooth the flow of social intercourse, it can be lifesaving.
If your friend’s boyfriend has just dumped her, don’t tell her it’s because she has the personality of a bowl of cereal and that her two-stone weight gain didn’t help: lay all the blame on him and then encourage her to take up new activities, preferably ones needing a bit of physical exercise.
It’s called being kind. If another mate wants to give up her job to pursue a career as a singer, despite the fact that she has a voice like a foghorn, find some other ways ofdissuading her.
Tell her she’s so good at her current job that apromotion is surely just around the corner. That may be a lie too, but at least it will stop her from ruining her life.
As for embellishing, if you weave a fantasy world that has no grounds at all in the reality of your life, then “we have a problem, Houston” as Rachel from Accounts could testify. You should also try to make sure you won’t get found out.
I knew someone who claimed his father was a gynaecologist when dad was in fact a dentist (don’t ask me why he embellished that one – a dentist is perfectly respectable) and the reason he got found out was that said father was actually my parents’ dentist.
His parents were in Manchester, so were mine, and what were the odds, eh?
“I speak as I find,” is one of the most horrible sentiments in the English language. If we all did that no one would get out of bed in the morning.
“I speak to make life a little better for some people,”is a far better way of putting it. Eamonn might not be perfect, but on this one, he’s right.