Love and Lies

The prize-winning author and philosopher shares a provocative and deeply personal look at the complex relationship between deception and desire.

Is it possible to love well without lying? At least since Plato’s Symposium, philosophers have argued that love can lead us to the truth about ourselves and our loved ones. 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.

Clancy Martin—who has married three times—draws on his own life experience, as well as contemporary philosophy, psychoanalysis, cognitive neuroscience, and such famed and diverse writers on love as Shakespeare, Stendhal, Proust, Adrienne Rich, and Raymond Carver to explore 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.