Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love

by Clancy Martin

A provocative and unsettling look at the nature of love and deception

Is it possible to love well without lying? At least since Socrates's discourse on love in Plato's Symposium , philosophers have argued that love can lead us to the truth―about ourselves and the ones we love. But in the practical experience of erotic love―and perhaps especially in marriage―we find that love and lies often work hand in hand, and that it may be difficult to sustain long-term romantic love without deception, both of oneself and of others.
Drawing on contemporary philosophy, psychoanalysis and cognitive neuroscience, his own personal experience, and such famed and diverse writers on love as Shakespeare, Stendhal, Proust, Adrienne Rich, and Raymond Carver, Clancy Martin―himself divorced twice and married three times―explores how love, truthfulness, and deception work together in contemporary life and society. He concludes that learning how to love and loving well inevitably requires lying, but also argues that the best love relationships draw us slowly and with difficulty toward honesty and trust.
Love and Lies is a relentlessly honest book about the difficulty of love, which is certain to both provoke and entertain.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Essays, Self Help

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 22, 2015

About the author

Clancy Martin (PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 2003) is Professor of Philosophy at University of Missouri-Kansas City. He works on nineteenth century philosophy, existentialism, moral psychology, applied ethics, and Buddhism.

Clancy’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine (where he is a contributing editor), The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The London Review of Books, GQ, Esquire, Ethics, The Times Literary Supplement, Vice (where he is a contributing editor), The London Times, Australian Financial Times, The Dublin Times, Details, New York, Elle, The Harvard Advocate, The Columbia Journalism Review, Bookforum, and many other publications. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, including Portuguese, Korean, and Mandarin. In 2009 and 2015 Kansas City's The Pitch named Clancy their "Best Author of the Year."

Reviews

[Matthew Binder · Rating 5 out of 5]

I originally discovered Clancy Martin while reading the Vice Fiction Issue from 2012. He had written a piece called Whores I Have Loved. The piece begins with him in Mexico, after his second marriage has just ended, and he’s fallen for a former debutante from Georgia who has tossed off the prospect of going to Med School in favor of chasing adventure, landing her working as a prostitute in a Mexican whorehouse. Dr. Martin wrote about how night after night he would sit and watch and wait as she took other men off to have sex and how they would return afterwards looking tranquil and sated, and how he didn’t feel jealous of these men, but instead felt a strange sort of fraternal connection to them because they too understood what it meant to be touched and moved by this woman. Before having read the story I didn’t think it possible for a work to exist that was so honest and vulnerable and tender about a subject as fraught with moral pitfalls as the unrequited love for a prostitute that comes in the aftermath of a marriage that ended due to the lover’s own infidelity. Anyhow, afterward, I sought out Dr. Martin’s novel, How to Sell, and found the book to be equally as affecting. Then I anxiously waited several years for another major piece of work to arrive from Dr. Martin, and it’s finally here: Love and Lies. My favorite thing about reading books written by people much smarter than myself is that they can assign words to feelings I have but can’t express. That’s exactly what Dr. Martin does here. He takes all the peculiar behaviors and possibly shameful feelings every one of is guilty of in love and helps us to make sense of them. He does this in two different ways. First, he adroitly guides us through the philosophical literature of loving and lying. From Plato to Nietzsche, Dr. Martin’s erudition on the subject is communicated in elegant and masterful prose, taking subject matter that in the hands of a less skilled writer would be terribly tricky terrain to navigate, and makes it easy for us philosophy neophytes to digest. And, secondly, he further illuminates the text with both outrageously funny and heartbreakingly tragic anecdotal stories from his own experiences with love and lying. Sentences as poignant and upright as, “One reason Thai prostitutes are so much better than western prostitutes is that in Thailand a prostitute kisses you, and you don’t feel that she is trying not to kiss you while kissing you,” can only come from a man who has not only loved with reckless abandon but has also chased every one of his abject desires down the most treacherous of rabbit holes. We all owe Dr. Martin our heartfelt gratitude for not only surviving his checkered past but for having the courage to share his story and message so that we can all be a little bit wiser, more compassionate, and better stewards of the love we’re lucky enough to have bestowed upon us in our own lives.

[catinca.ciornei · Rating 2 out of 5]

Could not finish the book, sorry to say. It felt it would not have added much to my reading experience.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly really entertaining book. Sometimes too convoluted, but ultimately charming and heart-warming.

[Victoria Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a truly unique book. The contents are simple: Prologue: Why I wrote this book. 1. A Brief Introduction to the Morality of Deception, 2. Childhood, 3. First Loves, 4. Erotic Love, 5. Marriage. (The author is currently in his 3rd marriage). This is a small, relatively short book, and is crammed with various philosophical viewpoints, literary references and interpretations, many antidotes from the author's own life (some will make you blush, and kudos to him for having the courage to put them down in front of 'all eyes'.) It is a wonderful book for mulling over thoughts about such things as 'lying', human interactions in general, how people treat one another, how lovers treat one another, things we do to one another and reasons why we may do them. Clancy Martin is really a searcher and has led quite a life, taking him at times to places most of us don't have to experience in our searches for the truths of various subjects. I'm glad I read this book, and will probably read it again. My favorite comment on the back cover is, "A philosophical memoir with juicy details and an aching sense of loss and yearning -- in other words, something entirely strange and new from a wounded lover of the truth." ~ Walter Kern, author of Up in the Air and Blood Will Out. I would most certainly agree with that comment.

[Tofts Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written prose with deep-cutting honesty.

Author Martin opens the narrative with shocking and, sometimes uncomfortable, episodes. As the book progresses, the reader feels the naivety and rawness of the characters he writes about. This is truly a deep and sincere account of the events of the author’s life. He brings an authentic and open approach to seemingly mundane life experiences.

Because of the elegant way Author Martin approaches his emotions, he effectively captivates the reader. At the beginning of the book, I felt I was sitting on a park bench in Fish Creek Park with a stranger. By the end of the book, I was sitting with a new best friend. It is rare that Philosophy books can move me so quickly and easily like this one did.

-- Tofts Reviews

[Andrew]

Why I abandoned it - in one sentence: Because as interesting as it is, I haven't picked it up in so long that I've forgotten the first half.

I probably would have given it: four stars

[Zinnia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Funny how he talks of deception so much that he no longer seems credible in my eyes

[Tait Jensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

How strange that a book about love and its connection to lies should be filled with so much truth. As someone with a complicated view of marriage, I found this manifesto both hopeful and refreshing. As Martin concludes, love is more a refining of truth about the partnership, and less a commitment to truth between partners. To keep the enchantment of love alive, therefore, should be the aim of any couple; that there is an inherent untruth to romance is a fact, but this does not make it any less praiseworthy. Quite contrary to the title, this is a book of tremendous optimism, particularly in an age of rampant divorce.

[Pragthika · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a good book and it is interesting. It definitely took some time to finish but was a good read.

[Liam Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, thank you to Patrick for reccomending it.

"But the truth of the matter is that we are experts at hiding our thoughts from ourselves, and we are probably even better at deceiving ourselves than we are at deceiving other people."

"Chris Rock gets it exactly right in his joke "when you meet someone new, you aren't meeting that person; you're meeting his agent"

"Because for thousands of years, at least since Plato taught in the symposium that love is a ladder that leads us to the truth, our culture has supposed that intimacy go hand in hand. Of course in many instances they do. And yet while we are holding the beloved by one truthful hand, were using the other hand fingers crossed, to hold on with deception"

"This, I'm arguing is the most fundamental source of childhood lying: the suspicion by the child that telling the truth will create emotional distance between the parent and the child. "If I admit what I did, she will be angry with me, she will love me less; if I lie, she won't know, and she will love me just the same, or perhaps still more, since the lie will reassure her." Of course the double bind is that in lying, not only do we risk further separation, but we also alienate ourselves. Every lie we tell is itself a small separation, an assertion of loneliness, a reminder that you know the contents of your own mind and the other person does not."

“These days, of course, as I expect it is for most of us in adulthood, master

“... He had never seen kissing before. He said, “For you it is an expression of love. To me it looked disgusting.” It isn’t love, quite. It is, as Freud would have said, wanting to put the whole world in one’s mouth. Wanting to put the whole person in one’s mouth. Wanting to eat the other person and to be eaten.”

"And when I am with my wife, I do not feel alone."

"Arthur Schopenhauer writes: "To marry means to become an object of disgust to each other." And there is a kind of marriage paradox shared by both Schwitzgebel and Schopenhauer: that transparency or openness - complete honesty, complete exposure - is the desirable goal of a marriage. Schopenhauer's idea is that insofar as we become more and more known to each other in the everydayness of living together as a married couple, the pleasentries, illusions, and charms - the social deceptions - that we all practice in order to get along with fellow human beings will be increasingly exposed, and so we will inevitably become repulsive to each other."

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

From a very young age, we immediately trust those around us until we are let down. Adrienne Rich writes, "When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For a while, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship." (57-8) Because of this, we begin lying at a very young age by telling people what they want to hear, or more likely, what we think they want to hear or what will bring us some comfort or safety. This book by Clancy Martin touches on something true. In order to tell a lie, we both have to deceive ourselves (that is, lie to ourselves) and imagine what it is like to be another person. Even as very young children, we begin lying, or call it playing make-believe. As bell hooks has written, "Concealing the truth is often a fun part of childhood play, yet when it becomes a common practice it is a dangerous prelude to lying all the time." (63) The interesting thing about some views of history (such as Hegel's) is that human development from childhood can be compared to a culture's development. The same things that plague a human being plague a city. Take the story of Oedipus. Oedipus was already born cursed to some extent. Is fate something to trust or fear?

for more, see http://homersmuse.blogspot.be/2015/04...

[Claire Binkley · Rating 1 out of 5]

My straight-forward review: I don't think it is ever a good idea to blur the lines of reality. Does that mean I won't in the context of a relationship? Honestly, no, but it does mean that this essay of a book made me feel extremely sick.

Books that drive me to the toilet automatically get all points deducted from the final score, even if I've said before that I rate based on effectiveness of word more than whether I liked it.
There's a possibility that the reason I got so sick is related to the medication carousel I'm riding rather than these lofty principles of truth and deceit, but it is remote, since my neurologist has approved my reduction plan.

C. Martin argues that usually people don't tell the truth, which is a valid enough conclusion. But that argument made me wonder after the validity of social science, a debate which greatly upsets me both ways.

Overall, I decided I'm not in the right mental place to appreciate this book right now. Maybe one of you might like it, though, it's popular.

[Cinematic Cteve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is it possible to love well without lying? Martin argues that not only is this possible, but imperative to loving well. This is a subversive, jangling book, almost unprecedented in its apparent honesty. He riffs quite a bit on Aristophanes, which to my mind bolsters the overall argument in support of deception as a means to understanding and more fully enjoying the nature of love. Martin sweetens the sauce with some choice observations by Shakespeare, Proust and Stendhal -- heavy hitters in conveying the madness of romantic love. Solid stuff, possibly engineered to agitate and definitely to provoke. I find myself agreeing with more of Martin's ideas than I would have suspected going in. Some, not all, we agree on. The main downside to discrediting his position on lying is that it's too damn easy. Love is hot. Truth is molten. And far more dangerous. This, perhaps, is why there would be an advocate for deception. It is, Martin seems to believe, the oil that lubricates the easily-broken gears of the heart.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

The premise is that deception and self-deception are required and willingly encouraged in love and sex. E.g. you choose either hopeful romance or banal reality. Essentially you create a fantasy that has no foundation, and day by day, a foundation appears under what was once a castle in the sky. It is an entirely different philosophy of romance, and reading the book will affect you. You're creating something out of thin air, but before you know it, you have created something real out of thin air.

[Hilary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started this book so long ago that it's hard to summarize the parts that I've already incorporated into my daily life. Suffice it to say: it was a paradigm-shifting read for me. A good complement to someone already thinking in a psychoanalytical style. There were parts I didn't love, but I loved the book.

How can you not love this re-framing of The Boy Who Cried Wolf? "He’s lonely. But in his attempt to deal with his loneliness, he winds up losing his friends entirely."

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up at Stories. He never really did describe the lies it is necessary to tell in love, but he certainly made a strong case for minimal deception. I enjoyed the Nietzsche quotes and his embarrassing personal anecdotes about infidelity, masturbation, obsessive love, crack, jewelry selling, etc.

[Iworld1991 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read two chapters of the book, about the erotic love and marriage. I have not thought about these issues before. Some juicy stories about the author's own love and sex life. Equally interesting is the philosophical discussions.

[Liz Harmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the best bits of this book are the explorations of what philosophy and art have to say about love and self-deception. Quotes from C.S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Proust, Sartre, Nietzsche. However, I often found the argument and its tone very irksome.

[JEM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novelist and philosopher Clancy Martin is brutally honest in his book on deception and self-deception. There are a lot of truths in Love & Lies. An entertaining, thought provoking, must read.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like reading "How to Sell," Martin's fine novel, has forever skewed how I read his work. An interesting look at lies and love, but one that is often too caught up in Martin's experiences.

[Matt Seraph · Rating 3 out of 5]

A curious book from an acknowledged relentless liar.

Learned, but unwilling to look fully in the eyes the enormous difference between gentleness, small self-protective untruths, and deep deceptions - for good reason, given the author's self-described challenges with truthfulness.