by A. J. Jacobs
Once again, I feel the thrill of inappropriate candor. And I feel something else, too. The paradoxical joy of being free from choice. I had no choice but to tell the truth. I didn’t have to rack my brain figuring out how to hedge it, spin it, massage it.
“Just being honest.” I shrug. Nice touch, I decide; helps take the edge off. She’s got thick skin. She’ll be okay. And I’ll tell you this: I’ll never get a damn gift certificate from her again.
I still tell plenty of lies every day, but by the end of the week I’ve slashed the total by at least 40 percent. Still, the giddiness is wearing off. A life of Radical Honesty is filled with a hundred confrontations every day. They’re small, but relentless.
“Yes, I’ll come to your office, but I resent you for making me travel.”
“My boss said I should invite you to this meeting, although it wouldn’t have occurred to me to do so.”
“I have nothing else to say to you. I have run out of conversation.”
My wife tells me a story about switching operating systems on her computer. In the middle, I have to go help our son with something, then I forget to come back.
“Do you want to hear the end of the story or not?” she asks.
“Well…is there a payoff?”
“Fuck you.”
It would have been a lot easier to have kept my mouth closed and listened to her. It reminds me of an issue I raised with Blanton: Why make waves? “Ninety percent of the time I love my wife,” I told him. “And ten percent of the time I hate her. Why should I hurt her feelings that ten percent of the time? Why not just wait until that phase passes and I return to the true feeling, which is that I love her?”
Blanton’s response: “Because you’re a manipulative, lying son of a bitch.”
Maybe he’s right. It’s manipulative and patronizing to shut up and listen. But it’s exhausting not to.
One other thing is also becoming apparent: There’s a fine line between Radical Honesty and creepiness. Or actually no line at all. It’s simple logic: Men think about sex every three minutes, as the scientists at Redbook remind us. If you speak whatever’s on your mind, you’ll be talking about sex every three minutes.
I have a business breakfast with an editor from Rachael Ray’s magazine. As we’re sitting together, I tell her that I remember what she wore the first time we met—a black shirt that revealed her shoulders in a provocative way. I say that I’d try to sleep with her if I were single. I confess to her that I just attempted (unsuccessfully) to look down her shirt during breakfast.
She smiles. Though I do notice she leans back farther in her seat.
The thing is, the separate cubbyholes of my personality are merging. Usually, there’s a professional self, a home self, a friend self, a with-the-guys self. Now it’s one big improper mess. Either this woman and I have taken a step forward in our relationship, or she’ll never return my calls again.
When I get home, I keep the momentum going. I call a friend to say that I fantasize about his wife. (He says he likes my wife, too, and suggests a key party.)
I inform our nanny, Michelle, that “if my wife left me, I would ask you out on a date, because I think you are stunning.”
She laughs. Nervously.
“I think that makes you uncomfortable, so I won’t mention it again. It was just on my mind.”
Now I’ve made my own skin crawl. I feel like I should just buy a trench coat and start lurking around subway platforms. Blanton says he doesn’t believe sex talk in the workplace counts as sexual harassment—it’s tight-assed society’s fault if people can’t handle the truth—but my nanny confession just feels like pure abuse of power.
All this lasciviousness might be more palatable if I were a single man. In fact, I have a theory: I think Blanton devised Radical Honesty partly as a way to pick up women. It’s a brilliant strategy. The antithesis of mind games. Transparent mating.
And according to Blanton, it’s effective. He tells me about a woman he once met on a Paris subway and asked out for tea. When they sat down, he said, “I didn’t really want any tea; I was just trying to figure out a way to delay you so I could talk to you for a while, because I want to go to bed with you.” They went to bed together. Or another seduction technique of his: “Wanna fuck?”
“That works?” I asked.
“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s the creation of possibility.”
I lied today. A retired man from New Hampshire—a friend of a friend—wrote some poems and sent them to me. His wife just died, and he’s taken up poetry. He just wanted someone in publishing to read his work. A professional opinion.
I read them. I didn’t like them much, but I wrote to him that I thought they were very good.
So I e-mail Blanton for the first time since our meeting and confess what I did. I write, “His wife just died, he doesn’t have friends. He’s kind of pathetic. I read his stuff, or skimmed it actually. I didn’t like it. I thought it was boring and badly written. So I e-mailed a lie. I said I really like the poems and hope they get published. He wrote me back so excited and how it made his week and how he was about to give up on them but my e-mail gave him the stamina to keep trying.”
I ask Blanton whether I made a mistake.
He responds curtly. I need to come to his eight-day workshop to “even begin to get what [Radical Honesty] is about.” He says we need to meet in person.
Meet in person? Did he toss down so many bourbons I vanished from his memory? I tell him we did meet.
Blanton writes back testily that he remembers. But I still need to take a workshop (price tag: $2,800). His only advice on my quandary: “Send the man the e-mail you sent me about lying to him and ask him to call you when he gets it. . . . and see what you learn.”
Show him the e-mail? Are you kidding? What a hard-core bastard.
In his book, Radical Honesty, Blanton advises us to start sentences with the words “I resent you for” or “I appreciate you for.” So I write him back.
I resent you for being so different in these e-mails than you were when we met. You were friendly and engaging and encouraging when we met. Now you seem to have turned judgmental and tough. I resent you for giving me the advice to break that old man’s heart by telling him that his poems suck.
Blanton responds quickly. First, he doesn’t like that I expressed my resentment by e-mail. I should have come to see him. “What you don’t seem to get yet, A.J., is that the reason for expressing resentment directly and in person is so that you can experience in your body the sensations that occur when you express the resentment, while at the same time being in the presence of the person you resent, and so you can stay with them until the sensations arise and recede and then get back to neutral—which is what forgiveness is.”
Second, he tells me that telling the old man the truth would be compassionate, showing the “authentic caring underneath your usual intellectual bullshit and overvaluing of your critical judgment. Your lie is not useful to him. In fact, it is simply avoiding your responsibility as one human being to another. That’s okay. It happens all the time. It is not a mortal sin. But don’t bullshit yourself about it being kind.”
He ends with this: “I don’t want to spend a lot of time explaining things to you for your cute little project of playing with telling the truth if you don’t have the balls to try it.”
Condescending prick.
I know my e-mail to the old man was wrong. I shouldn’t have been so rah-rah effusive. But here I’ve hit the outer limit of Radical Honesty, a hard wall. I can’t trash the old man.
I try to understand Blanton’s point about compassion. To most of us, honesty often means cruelty. But to Blanton, honesty and compassion are in sync. It’s an intriguing way to look at the world, but I just don’t buy it in the case of the widower poet. Screw Blanton. (By the way: I broke Radical Honesty and changed the identifying details of the old-man story so as not to humiliate him. Also, I’ve messed a bit with the timeline of even
ts to simplify things. Sorry.)
To compensate for my wimpiness, I decide to toughen up. Which is probably the exact wrong thing to do. Today I’m getting a haircut, and my barber is telling me he doesn’t want his wife to get pregnant because she’ll get too fat (a bit of Radical Honesty of his own), and I say, “You know, I’m tired. I have a cold. I don’t want to talk anymore. I want to read.”
“Okay,” he says, wielding his scissors, “go ahead and read.”
Later, I do the same thing with my in-laws when they’re yapping on about preschools. “I’m bored,” I announce. “I’ll be back later.” And with that, I leave the living room.
I tell Blanton, hoping for his approval. Did anything come of it? he asks. Any discussions and insights? Hmm.
He’s right. If you’re going to be a schmuck, at least you should find some redeeming quality in it. Blanton’s a master of this. One of his tricks is to say things with such glee and enthusiasm, it’s hard to get too pissed. “You may be a petty asshole,” he says, “but at least you’re not a secret petty asshole.” Then he’ll laugh.
I have yet to learn that trick myself. Consider how I handled this scene at a diner a couple of blocks from my apartment.
“Everything okay?” asked our server, an Asian man with tattoos.
“Yeah, except for the coffee. I always have to order espresso here, because the espresso tastes like regular coffee. The regular coffee here is terrible. Can’t you guys make stronger coffee?”
The waiter said no and walked away. My friend looked at me. “I’m embarrassed for you,” he said. “And I’m embarrassed to be around you.”
“I know. Me, too.” I felt like a Hollywood producer who parks in handicapped spots. I ask Blanton what I should have done.
“You should have said, ‘This coffee tastes like shit!’” he says, cackling.
• • •
I will say this: One of the best parts of Radical Honesty is that I’m saving a whole lot of time. It’s a cut-to-the-chase way to live. At work, I’ve been waiting for my boss to reply to a memo for ten days. So I write him: “I’m annoyed that you didn’t respond to our memo earlier. But at the same time, I’m relieved, because then if we don’t nail one of the things you want, we can blame any delays on your lack of response.”
Pressing SEND makes me nervous—but the e-mail works. My boss responds: “I will endeavor to respond by tomorrow. Been gone from N.Y. for two weeks.” It is borderline apologetic. I can push my power with my boss further than I thought.
Later, a friend of a friend wants to meet for a meal. I tell him I don’t like leaving my house. “I agree to meet some people for lunch because I fear hurting their feelings if I don’t. And in this terrifying age where everyone has a blog, I don’t want to offend people, because then they’d write on their blogs what an asshole I am, and it would turn up in every Google search for the rest of my life.”
He writes back: “Normally, I don’t really like meeting editors anyway. Makes me ill to think about it, because I’m afraid of coming off like the idiot that, deep down, I suspect I am.”
That’s one thing I’ve noticed: when I am radically honest, people become radically honest themselves. I feel my resentment fade away. I like this guy. We have a good meeting.
In fact, all my relationships can take a whole lot more truth than I expected. Consider this one: For years, I’ve had a chronic problem where I refer to my wife, Julie, by my sister’s name, Beryl. I always catch myself midway through and pretend it didn’t happen. I’ve never confessed to Julie. Why should I? It either means that I’m sexually attracted to my sister, which is not good, or that I think of my wife as my sister, also not good.
But today, in the kitchen, when I have my standard mental sister-wife mix-up, I decide to tell Julie about it.
“That’s strange,” she says.
We talk about it. I feel unburdened, closer to my wife now that we share this quirky, slightly disturbing knowledge. I realize that by keeping it secret, I had given it way too much weight. I hope she feels the same way.
I call up Blanton one last time, to get his honest opinion about how I’ve done.
“I’m finishing my experiment,” I say.
“You going to start lying again?” he asks.
“Hell yeah.”
“Oh, shit. It didn’t work.”
“But I’m going to lie less than I did before.”
I tell him about my confession to Julie that I sometimes want to call her Beryl. “No big deal,” says Blanton. “People in other cultures have sex with their sisters all the time.”
I bring up the episode about telling the editor from Rachael Ray’s magazine that I tried to look down her shirt, but he sounds disappointed. “Did you tell your wife?” he asks. “That’s the good part.”
I confess I didn’t tell Julie about the cleavage incident, but I did tell my wife that I was bored and didn’t want to hear the end of her story about fixing her computer. Blanton asks how she responded.
“She said, ‘Fuck you.’”
“That’s good!” Blanton says. “I like that. That’s communicating.”
CODA
Here’s my radically honest opinion of my piece on Radical Honesty: I like some parts—especially the outrageous quotes from Blanton. And I think the intro works—though, frankly, I borrowed the idea (okay, swiped it) from Blanton himself. His book has a section called “The Truth About Why I Am Writing This Book,” where he says “I want to become famous.…I want to get rich.…I want to be like Jesus.”
But overall, my attempts at Radical Honesty could have been more hard-core. If I’d removed my filter in every single situation—instead of 90 percent of the time—I probably would have gotten beaten up, fired, and divorced. Then Blanton could never accuse me of “a superficial dipshit job.” Then again, I might not have lived to write this piece.
I will say this: When you write an essay about Radical Honesty, you’re asking for trouble. This came out in Esquire in 2007. Most of the feedback was positive (that’s the truth), but I also got plenty of e-mails that said I suck. Or more precisely, I “suuuuuck.” And my friends wrote me notes with subject lines like “Try standing up straight once in a while.”
I had to do some apologizing post-piece, as you might imagine. I apologized to the woman whose cleavage I checked out. And to Julie’s parents. And to the poor Esquire intern who transcribed the tapes—not just because of Brad Blanton’s obscenities, but because I forgot to turn off my tape recorder when I went to pee. Three times. Sorry again, Meryl.
I knew I’d have to apologize. Since I’m laying it all out there, I’ll confess that my motive for doing the experiment wasn’t 100 percent pure. There was a devious aspect to Radical Honesty that attracted me. Here was a way to confront people without repercussions. Or with fewer repercussions, anyway. I could defend myself by saying, “Hey, I’m just doing my job, people. It’s the project.” Then say sorry later.
I got to tell my mom that I hate the smoked turkey she serves at her holiday party. I got to tell some old college acquaintances of Julie’s that no, I’m afraid I do not want to have a playdate with them, since I rarely get to see my closest friends.
I still practice Radical Honesty—though only in certain situations. Call it Sustainable Radical Honesty. I’m especially fond of Radical Honesty about my own flaws and mistakes. I love the liberating feeling. No desperate scrambles to come up with excuses. No searching my memory banks to figure out what I told Peter versus Paul. It’s all out there. Yeah, I screwed up.
I’ve also learned my relationships can tolerate a lot more Radical Honesty than I thought. If I just don’t feel up to having lunch with a friend, I don’t say my grandfather’s in town for a special visit and I have to go on the Circle Line. I just say the truth. I don’t feel like it. I’ve got three kids hopped up on high-fructose corn syrup and I need to take a nap.
But Radical Honesty about other people’s flaws—that I can’t do. I’m still a pathologic
al white liar. Blanton thinks it’s false compassion. I think it can be real compassion—especially if your wife asks you about her necklace on the way to the party, long after she can change it.
And after experiments with rationality and civility (see chapters 5 and 6), I’ve come to appreciate the filter between the brain and mouth. Words can be dangerous. Once they’re out in the atmosphere, they can become self-fulfilling prophecies. You say out loud that your wife’s friend is boring, then next time you see her, you perceive her as more boring.
Another confession: Since the article came out, the Radical Honesty concept has seeped out into the culture a bit more—and it kind of annoys me. A minor character on the Fox cop drama Lie to Me is a Radical Honesty practitioner. When I first saw the show, I said, where’s my credit? Where’s my cut? Like I came up with the concept or something. Deluded, greedy bastard I am.
The Radical Honesty meme also caught on with single men, oddly enough. I met a Wall Street banker who said that, after reading the article, he and his friends had started using Radical Honesty as a pickup line. They’d go up to a woman in a bar and say, “I’m trying this new thing called Radical Honesty. And the honest truth is, I find you very attractive and would like to go home with you.”
Nine times out of ten they’d get slapped in the face. But there was that one time. . ..
And finally, regardless of what my editor thinks, I’m pretty convinced we’ll all soon live in a radically honest world, for better or worse. It’s going to be hard to keep secrets when every second of your life is Twittered and satellite-photographed and captured by tiny cameras. The truth will out.
Chapter Four
240 Minutes of Fame
Me as Noah Taylor.
Noah Taylor as Noah Taylor.
In my real life, I’ve had just the tiniest taste of what it’s like to be famous. Three instances come to mind:
1. The book festival in Texas where I met my one and only rabid fan—a man who took off his sweater to reveal passages of my book scrawled on his T-shirt in Magic Marker. (Later, Israeli writer Etgar Keret would tell me that one of his fans got a chest tattoo of his book’s cover, which made me feel small and inadequate.)
