You said you posted the parcel, but you hadn’t.
Had you admitted forgetting, you’re pretty sure your partner would have been annoyed, and there’d have been a familiar conversation about why they always have to remind you to do stuff. So instead, you just say it’s been done. A few days later they find the parcel still in the car, and now they’re more annoyed than they may have been had you just told them the truth.
The forgotten parcel now means something to your partner that it previously didn’t.
They’re questioning why you told them you’d posted it when you hadn’t. And are now wondering, if you can lie about something so small and inconsequential, what else might you lie about?
The purpose of the lie
Understanding why we lie may tell us more than the lie itself. I think many people who opt to tell a white lie instead of telling the truth do so for one of two reasons: to save the other person from hurt, or to save themselves from shame.
I call these the virtuous lies and the self-protective lies. There is, of course, another lie, the malicious lie which is purposely designed to do harm to the other person, however that isn’t what I’m focussing on here. Here, I’m talking about the type of lying that rolls off the tongue in a moment of panic and often without much thought.
You may not always perceive the panic, but it can often be lurking somewhere underneath when you’re faced with that moment of knowing that the honest answer to the question you’ve just been asked probably won’t go down well.
It creates an incongruence between what you believe and what you believe the person asking wants to hear, which can be difficult to reconcile in a split second.
So, to alleviate the discomfort, a lie emerges to save everyone’s blushes. It may seem like a good idea at the time, after all, it’s only a little white lie, right?
But what it creates in its wake can have far worse consequences for your relationship.
The ‘virtuous’ lie that keeps the peace
We use “white lie” to describe the type of deception we deem harmless. Like when your partner proudly serves a meal they’ve spent hours cooking, and you tell them it’s delicious even though the sauce is far too salty. Very little depends on you liking the sauce, but it does on you saying that you don’t like it. So you’d rather lie to spare their feelings.
Research by Levine and Schweitzer (2015) into what is known as “prosocial lying” suggests that people respond differently when they believe a lie was told for their benefit. They may even see the person who lied as more benevolent. However, the research also shows that, yes, they may view you with benevolence, but they may also end up trusting your honesty a little less.
However, good intentions don’t necessarily remove the cost of the lie. Research has also found that people who reported more “relational lies”, meaning lies intended to protect relationships or spare someone’s feelings, also reported more loneliness. Sprigings et al. (2023) found that people instructed to lie throughout a conversation with a stranger felt less close to them than truth-tellers did. A well-meant lie may therefore still have a relational cost.
The deception of a self-protective lie
There is another kind of white lie that isn’t about protecting the receiver, but is instead designed to protect the teller.
This is the self-protective lie.
You say the parcel has been posted because admitting it hasn’t means dealing with your partner’s annoyance. Perhaps you remembered the moment they asked and, in a split second to avoid their disappointment, you said yes. The exposing conversation has been avoided and you’ll remember to do it first thing tomorrow. Problem solved. So it seems…
People describing why they deceive romantic partners give reasons such as avoiding conflict, protecting how they’re seen by a partner and retaining some control over an interaction (Guthrie & Kunkel, 2013). “I didn’t want an argument” may be true, although as a relationship therapist, I’m more interested in why the potential fallout made lying preferable.
Facing an altered self-perception
Self-protective lies run deeper than social politeness.
Forgetting to post a parcel is hardly a serious offence, but admitting it can still feel too exposing to declare. Once you say, “I forgot”, you have revealed something about yourself, and then you’re out of control of how someone else might take it or what they think of you.
Deceptive lies can reveal a crack in self-perception that the teller is attempting to avoid. You may find yourself thinking: if I admit the truth, will my partner still see me as the person I want them to see? They may see you as careless or incapable, or connect it with the last time they asked you to do something you said you would do, but didn’t.
And this can go further: what if I’ve also been lying to myself about who I really am? This can feel harder for some of us than we’d like to admit. Being criticised can quickly turn into feeling ashamed. A complaint about something we have or haven’t done can feel like a judgement about the kind of person we are.
We may believe that if we can keep our partner seeing us as the person we need to believe we are, we avoid exposing something less flattering. Revealing the lie therefore risks dispelling that fantasy and having to face your partner, and probably yourself, seeing you as flawed.
This is where shame enters the picture.
Shame is closely tied to identity and to the experience of being seen by another person (Weiss, 2015). If being unreliable is already something you fear about yourself, a small mistake can feel as though it has exposed something much bigger. The fear can shift from I forgot the parcel to this is what you now think I am, or worse still, this is now who I think I am. The parcel then comes to mean something it never meant on its own. Saying it was posted provides a brief emotional escape.
A very small lie can serve to protect an important version of ourselves. If it’s important to me that you see me as reliable, saying I forgot risks changing how I think you see me. Saying I posted it lets me keep that version of myself in place for a little longer. It also protects me from the possibility that you may see something in me that I already struggle to accept myself.
Anticipating a bad outcome
“I knew you’d be annoyed.”
This can often be the response after a lie is discovered.
It may seem like a reasonable conclusion based on your relationship history. Maybe your partner does get annoyed when you forget things. The two of you may have had versions of this conversation many times before.
The better we know someone, the easier it is to assume we already know how they’ll react. Although drawing this conclusion leaves very little room for the possibility that they might say or do something else this time. When their response has already happened in your head, along with the argument that follows, by the time you’ve said the lie, you may already feel certain the argument is coming.
Mentalising means staying curious about what your partner might be thinking, while accepting you can never know for certain. You’re making a best guess, however well you know them.
Stronger mentalising tends to go with greater relationship satisfaction and less conflict, although we still don’t know exactly how one influences the other (Hurman et al., 2026). Leaving room to be wrong about your partner means you can respond to what they actually say instead of the reaction you’ve already imagined.
The problem comes when you start treating your guess as a fact.
If you already ‘know’ your partner will be unreasonable, angry or disappointed, being economical with the truth can seem justified. After all, they can only respond to what you tell them, right?
But part of being close to someone is accepting that they have a mind of their own. They may see things differently from you, and you can’t decide how they will react. Benjamin (1990) describes this as recognising the other person as separate from us, rather than assuming they will fit what we expect of them.
That sounds obvious until someone we love thinks something about us that we wish they didn’t.
Their separateness is much easier to enjoy when they’re pleased with us. The little white lie tries to keep some control over the discomfort of this. If I can influence what you know, I have a better chance of influencing what you think of me.
When the lie is found out
The person who lied knows exactly how far the deception went. Their partner doesn’t.
Perhaps this really was the only time. The person who told the lie can be completely certain of that. The difficulty is that reassurance now depends on the same source that has just proved unreliable.
A small lie can leave your partner questioning things they previously trusted. An ordinary answer that would’ve once ended a conversation can prompt another question: “Is that really true?”
Most intimate relationships depend on thousands of claims that are never checked. Someone says they paid the bill and you assume they paid it. They tell you what happened during their day and you listen rather than investigate. Living together would be almost impossible without this basic willingness to take another person at their word.
This is where “it was only a little white lie” doesn’t really cut it. The smallness of the lie may even make it harder to understand. If something so trivial was worth lying about, the other person is left wondering what happens when the truth carries a much greater weight.
This is no longer about getting yourself off the hook. The lie has made trust itself part of the problem.
The irritating truth
So what if the conversation you’re avoiding isn’t actually the disaster you imagine?
Levine and Cohen (2018) suggest the conversation we’re trying to avoid may not go as badly as we imagine. Their research found that people expected honest conversations to be more damaging than they were, and those who actually had them often felt more socially connected than people predicted.
Honesty can still go badly. A partner may have good reason to feel angry. How that anger is expressed becomes part of what each person learns about telling the truth in the relationship.
Honesty is easier when your partner knows they can tell you something you won’t like and still be heard. You can be annoyed that the parcel is still in the car and still make it possible for the other person to admit it.
The person who lies has to ask why being seen as disappointing felt so hard. The person being lied to may also have to ask what tends to happen when their partner tells them something they don’t want to hear.
The lie, of course, remains the responsibility of the person who told it. But it may reveal a question that you both need to think about: What have you come to expect will happen when the truth is inconvenient?
References
Benjamin, J. (1990). An outline of intersubjectivity: The development of recognition. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 7(Suppl.), 33–46.
Guthrie, J. A., & Kunkel, A. D. (2013). Tell me sweet (and not-so-sweet) little lies: Deception in romantic relationships. Communication Studies, 64(2), 141–157.
Hurman, K., Shaikh, M., Greene, T., & O’Driscoll, C. (2026). Mentalization and couple relationships: A systematic review of associations and interventions. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice. Advance online publication.
Levine, E. E., & Cohen, T. R. (2018). You can handle the truth: Mispredicting the consequences of honest communication. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(9), 1400–1429.
Levine, E. E., & Schweitzer, M. E. (2015). Prosocial lies: When deception breeds trust. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 126, 88–106.
Sprigings, S., Brown, C. J. V., & ten Brinke, L. (2023). Deception is associated with reduced social connection. Communications Psychology, 1, Article 19.
Weiss, H. (2015). Introduction: The role of shame in psychoanalytic theory and practice. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 96(6), 1585–1588.