The Concept of Honesty

“Honey, does this dress make me look fat?”
“Ew, yes honey. It looks like you got a bit too much junk in the trunk for it to fit right.”
“Did you have to be so mean about?”
“Well, you asked me a ques-”
“I asked you as my husband to give me an honest answer, not be a jerk!”
“But that’s what I was do-”
“Forget it, we’re not going out tonight. I’m not in a good mood anymore...”

Harsh, is it not? One simple answer to a question can cause a mountain of problems unforeseen. And yet, in this case, the wife was looking for an honest answer; she said it herself! Why get so upset over it then? Why lash out just because it was not what she had wanted to hear? It does not make any sense, and yet this, and many other situations like it, happens all the time. We ask for honesty, we crave it - until it clashes with what we believe in, that is.
I am very familiar with this situation as it happens almost weekly at my house. Whenever my mom is getting ready for a party or get-together, whatever it may be, she will undoubtedly ask my father for his opinion. And he gives it to her - one hundred percent honest one hundred percent of the time. Sometimes she will take his opinion and just go with it, other times she gets upset and she argues with him, a lot. I often ask him why he does not just lie to appease her, make her happy so that he no longer has to hear her yell at him. His answer is always the same: “That wouldn’t be very honest of me, would it?”
“I guess it wouldn’t, but at least you’d be out of the doghouse, right?”
“Until she finds out that I lied to her in the first place. All lies come back to you in one way or the other, I can promise you that. And that lie, that betrayal, hurts much more than me simply telling her she looks fat in that dress. Which she does, if you haven’t noticed.”
His answer always gets me thinking about the consequences of telling the truth versus the benefits of lying (and, occasionally, how in the heck he had managed to charm my mother