I had been with my boyfriend, Tyler, for almost 10 years when we finally agreed that we should get engaged and married. Up until then, our respective jobs – mine as an academic, his as a fisherman – had forced us to endure long stretches apart.

But I had been offered a permanent academic job teaching philosophy in Florida. Tyler said he was willing to start a business there. It seemed like the beginning of a new, stable chapter of our lives.

We moved before he officially proposed, however. Then he went to Canada for seasonal work.

In our new house in Florida, the engagement ring remained stashed away in a box for the three months he was in Canada, a period in which we didn’t see each other at all.

Alone in a new and exciting place, I tested the boundaries of our relationship to the breaking point.

Self-deception is at the heart of lying

Aristotle says that truthfulness is the virtuous middle ground between exaggeration and understatement when communicating with others. One can only become virtuous by habituation – one becomes just by doing just acts; one becomes truthful by practicing truth-telling.

Unfortunately, we can much more easily steer ourselves in the opposite direction. Vice emerges from a series of small permissions and self-deceptions that break down the walls of limits and restraint.

Aristotle said that lying is an unjust act. Every time we slide a lie into our testimony, we move a little closer to developing the vice of injustice.

I was, it turned out, failing in exactly this regard, at a time that I was studying and writing on Aristotle.

In Florida, I felt untethered. I threw myself into surfing. And exercising. And meeting people.

I also threw myself into dancing. I had already line danced a decent bit in the past, and I had even been salsa dancing once before.

But Florida’s dance culture was exhilarating. There were countless lessons to sign up for, parties where I could practice my moves, and festivals to attend. Each event was charged with undercurrents of romance and flirtation. I convinced myself that these were both harmless and fruitful, as dancing was allowing me to “get to know” other people in interesting ways.

When I was out late one night at a dance club, a young woman came up to me just to tell me how beautiful my dance partner and I looked together – how he treated me “like a queen.” At first concerned that she and others thought we were a couple, I quickly dismissed it as unimportant.

I didn’t tell Tyler about that encounter. Nor did I mention the night I spent a little too closely with someone else dancing alone.

The omissions multiplied.

I drove two hours to dance with a different man, driving home at 2 in the morning, half asleep at the wheel. Soon after, I stopped sharing my phone location with Tyler, reasoning that since I didn’t have his location, he shouldn’t have mine.

To act truly viciously after having been at least a half-decent person, you first have to persuade yourself that the bad habit you’ve developed isn’t so bad after all. Lying to another consistently, then, requires lying to oneself about either the value of the truth or about what actually counts as true.

The irony is that I’m a philosopher who studies knowledge and virtue. I had even attended a weeklong workshop on honesty shortly before moving to Florida. That fall, I taught Aristotle’s virtue ethics to undergraduates, lecturing about moral character without pausing to measure the distance between his theories and my own life.

Meanwhile, the ring sat unopened in a drawer.

In truth-telling, timing is everything

In retrospect, my behavior in Florida didn’t come out of nowhere. A pattern had emerged years earlier.

Most of our relationship had unfolded across state lines. I moved to St. Louis for graduate school while he worked in Alabama. Later, he began working seasonally across the continent.

To ease my loneliness in graduate school, I spent much of my free time meeting people, including men – philosophy is a male-dominated field, after all.

Though I never became romantically involved with anyone, I would often spend time with other men, which, unsurprisingly, led to some unseemly situations. I might eat dinner out, one on one, with a male friend, or watch a movie with another guy at his house. There was the guy I’d take hourslong walks with occasionally, and the friend whose radio show I’d listen to every day.

Over time, it became clear that some of these men hoped for more.

One friend once asked, over coffee, “Are you sure you don’t have any single sisters?” Two other male friends often joked that my boyfriend must not exist, since they had never met him – that I invoked him only to deflect advances.

I avoided telling Tyler these stories in real time. I feared he would suggest creating distance. Instead, I waited until friendships faded naturally and then disclosed these sorts of details, reassuring myself that I was being transparent.

But truthfulness, like comedy, depends on timing. A late truth can function just like a lie, and Aristotle thought that the person who values the truth will always share it at the appropriate time.

Cold, hard truths

According to Aristotle, truthfulness as a virtue “requires us to honor truth above our friends.” In other words, truth should be honored utmost within a relationship, even if that means that your friend or partner may feel hurt by the truth. Truth is actually the foundation for a stable, virtuous friendship.

Tyler seemed to understand this instinctively, and, when I first began dating him, it didn’t take long to learn how brutally honest he could be.

Early in our relationship, I wanted to spend every day with him. But one day he told me that he would always need days where he was alone, because he didn’t always like to be around other people, including me. Later in our relationship, I joked about having a baby while being severely obese; Tyler responded plainly, “You’ll need to lose some weight before we have any kids.”

It was the first time anyone had ever told me that I needed to lose weight in order to have something I wanted or accomplish a goal.

I didn’t appreciate the wisdom of these messages, or see them as opportunities to learn and grow. Instead, I resented the messenger.

Aristotle thought that telling the truth is crucial in friendship and in general, even if it could lead to hurt feelings. Oftentimes, feeling wounded by the truth shows something in need of repair in you; maybe there is something you can do to improve yourself. If telling the truth harms the relationship, then your relationship was like a house of cards – it was built on lies, half-truths or omissions, making it fragile and susceptible to destruction when the truth finally shows up on the scene.

Justice is always accompanied by truth and trust for Aristotle; he believed that even political alliances and civic communities should be built on truthfulness rather than deception. For friendships and communities to really thrive, everyone involved has to value the truth for its own sake.

In many of these contexts, truth is not the priority; it didn’t used to be in my relationship either.

Honesty is a relationship’s beating heart

When Tyler got back to Florida, seeing him in person, I finally felt the guilt about what I had been doing – dancing in inappropriate ways, spending time with other men in romantic settings. As I told him the truth, I felt horribly ashamed. And rightly so: To tell the truth to Tyler was also to admit to myself that I had done something degrading and shameful.

In reality, my telling the truth was the only way for us to figure out whether the relationship could be and ought to be made whole again.

Tyler was always confident in the value of truth in his everyday life. I had been more skeptical, more prone to weakness of will and self-deception. His mindset didn’t change when the truth came out – he wanted to hear what I had to say, even though it hurt him deeply.

For Aristotle, truthfulness does not demand indiscriminate disclosure of every passing thought, nor does it license cruelty. But it does require an intention to be accurate and not mislead. And it was clear that throughout our relationship, I had been less than truthful and could take a page from Tyler’s book.

There is, of course, good reason for the clichés that “the truth hurts” and “the truth shall set you free.”

Taken together, they capture the idea that truth-telling can be a damaging yet liberating act, both for speakers and their audiences. I was – and often still am – resentful and disheartened when I hear difficult truths from Tyler, my parents or my friends.

But Aristotle emphasizes how the good and noble person – the magnanimous person – cares more about truth than about what other people think about him, and so he will be appreciative of the truth when he comes across it. He will also “speak and act openly,” including and particularly when others are doing something discreditable. When you have done something discreditable, Aristotle thinks that to become more good, to become more noble, you have to call yourself out for it.

Something changed after I opened up about what had been happening in Florida. I realized that I had resented Tyler for words that were true but hard to hear. And that was wrong; the truth should never be the source of resentment, but rather coming to know the truth should always be grounds for appreciation. Truth is not something that can override friendship; rather, truth is essential for genuine friendship.

In the moment, hearing the truth can feel uncomfortable or even devastating. But when the listener really values the truth, then even hearing something outrageously blunt or inappropriately timed can be made righteous – if it is used by the listener to become more self-aware and to make better decisions moving forward.

For Aristotle, truth is part of the aim of human life. That means that when human beings are at their absolute best, they are discovering truth and contemplating it once discovered.

After many months of rebuilding our relationship, Tyler and I eventually got engaged and married. We’re much stronger now because we’ve built a relationship explicitly on truthfulness, which involves both truth-telling and truth-seeking. We each recognize the importance of truth in giving us the chance to love one another more fully.

While rationalizing deception is easy to do, developing the virtue of truthfulness is not. But it’s an invaluable trait to develop – brutal honesty may temporarily wound, but deceptions, whether they’re small or large, will ultimately corrode all relationships.

This work was supported by the John Templeton Foundation grant “The Honesty Project” (ID#61842). Nevertheless, the opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.