LIES, MORE LIES AND DAMNED LIES

He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.
Graham Greene

The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
George Bernard Shaw

The N’s are pathological liars. That means that they will lie for no reason at all, they will lie when the truth would serve them better and they will lie even when it is highly possible that they will get caught. They lie to make themselves look good in the eyes of others and to make themselves feel as if they are bigger, faster, tougher, stronger or smarter. They lie in order to try to convince themselves that they are "someone", that they are alive and that they matter. The N’s have been lying to themselves for so long about who they are that it is no big stretch for them to lie to others about anything. I have often wondered if the N to whom I was married even understood the concept of truth. Does he just say whatever pops into his head and assume that whatever he thinks is truth? One wonders.
Nah.
His lies are too deliberate, too calculated to cause harm, too obviously puff pieces. He just lies because he gets away with it. At least, he sort of gets away with it, as long as you don’t count the loss of friends and family.
The N to whom I was married lied early on about how old he was when he was graduated from high school. He said he was graduated at age 16. The implication was that he was a regular Doogie Hauser. However, once I realized that he was a pathological liar who lied about any and every thing, I did the math. He was graduated from high school at age 17 ½. Hardly remarkable.
The N lied to our kids about me during our divorce proceeding. This, of course, came as no surprise. One of his early lies was that I had burned certain documents. The good news is that I had possession of the original document in question together with it’s original raised notary seal. When I pulled the document out and showed it to our daughter, she began to question her father.
This was a good thing.
Our daughter soon realized that the N frequently did not tell even her the truth. The worst of it for her was the Great Diamond Earrings Caper. The N gave her a pair of earrings and with great ceremony announced that they were diamond earrings. (You can probably see this one coming, can’t you?) Eventually, she went to a jeweler to have the earrings cleaned. The jeweler handed them back to her and said, “We do not clean cubic zirconium.” She was horrified to realize that he had lied to her about the earrings and that the “stones” were not big ass diamonds after all. She had worn the earrings for years, believing that at least at this one point in time, her father loved her.
She threw the earrings away.
The N will tell lies about you during your divorce and even afterwards. This is a certainty. After all, you left him. To the Ns, all is fair game and he is entitled to destroy you any way that he can as punishment for the high crime of abandoning him. In the N’s view, he is particularly entitled to destroy your reputation, or at least, what is left of it after hanging around with him.
The N to whom I was married told a series of lies to everyone who would listen during our epic divorce. He told people that I had suffered a nervous breakdown; that I had left and no one knew where I was for 2 weeks; and that I had become mentally ill. These claims were unsupported by anything that looked like proof or even corroboration. Simply because he said it, everyone was supposed to believe that this lie was true. The mental illness lie was particularly ironic in view of his diagnosed-by-a-psychiatrist, indisputable mental illnesses: clinical depression and narcissistic personality disorder.
The lies continued. The N told others in our small, rural, homophobic community that I was a lesbian. That lie was actually funny to most if not all who heard this. One couple to whom he told this reportedly rolled on the floor with laughter. Fortunately, this is such an obvious line of divorce-related bull that I don’t think that anyone believed it. It was clearly the raving of a lunatic, angry, soon-to-be-ex spouse. As such, it had all of the believability of my ex-husband; exactly none.
The only way to handle this Nixonian level of dirty tricks is to ignore the lies. You have to rise above them. The moment that you try to disprove the lies or even argue that you are not a lesbian using your two children as proof, you give the lie a level of credibility that it did not have before. The moment that you try to disprove the lies or even argue that you are not a lesbian using your two children as proof, you give the lie a level of credibility that it did not have before. While I did not really care very much whether acquaintances thought I was a lesbian or not, the effective tactic that I used was to ignore the lie.
I recommend that you do the same. Ignoring the N is always the worst possible fate for them. They want your (and everyone else’s) attention and will do and say anything, anything at all, to get it. By ignoring them, you cause them to suffer the worst possible fate that they can imagine: irrelevance.