Lying....or Not?

I was being a good little Baptist girl and reading my Sunday School lesson for last week and came across a statement that fueled a long, heated discussion with my husband.


The lesson was on forgiveness, but the statement concerned lying. We've had really good lessons this month, all about relationships and how to be trustworthy, forgiving, etc. Of course, everything (and I mean everything) gets filtered through my ever-present "SA filter." So maybe you wives will understand where I'm going with this and maybe you will agree with me since not too many people have.

Here's the statement. (I don't have the book beside me, so I'm paraphrasing).


.....telling the truth does not mean we have to disclose everything we know......


Okay, that may seem straightforward at first glance. And I suppose it is. I do agree with the statement, and I can think of many situations where disclosing everything I knew could have made a situation worse. I'm sure you can think of situations as well. In context of the paragraph, the author clearly meant it to promote honesty within the church, but to deter blabbermouths. I completely agree with this statement.


Except with my husband and his addiction. When I hold this statement up to our relationship and his honesty about his porn use, I come to a very different conclusion. If he does not tell me when he has looked at porn, and then I find out about it, that is just like lying to me. If he looks at porn today and doesn't tell me about it until June 29th, that is a full month of lies. Right?

Hubby does not think so. Get this, hubby believes it all depends on the question he is asked. If I do not specifically ask him if he has looked at porn today, then he is not lying. If I only ask how his day was, he can say "fine" and that to him is not a lie. If this logic is true, then it could be said that over the 10 years or so that hubby was binging on porn, wrecking our marriage, and keeping the whole crazy mess hidden from me, he never lied to me. Because I never asked him the specific question, "Are you looking at pornography?" I just knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what. So my question was usually, "What is wrong with you?"

Is this crazy to anybody else but me? Hubby knows I want to know within 24 hours of him looking at porn. So if he waits more than 24 hours, the result is LYING. His silence is a lie.

Now, I do understand that for you whose hubby's has actually had an affair with a living, breathing person, the word "disclosure" brings up a whole other issue. When? Where? How many times? What song was playing? And the list of questions could go on.....

Although I understand how you would want to know this, I also know that full disclosure is sometimes not the best way to go. Some things we are better off not knowing.

But I am just talking about honesty and trust between my hubby and me and him 'fessing up to looking at porn. I am not taking it upon myself to ask him every single day if he looked at porn...that is not my responsibility. I want him to have the courage to step up and take responsibility for it, no matter what question I might have asked.