Tough or fluff? - A free write on honesty

If you haven't seen How I Met Your Father on Hulu, you are missing out. I am no TV buff, but it's an excellent show. The acting is getting there, and the writing is impeccable.

At the end of the second season, the main character is being a weirdo about a guy she has a crush on and is acting in a rather weak manner. She goes to her best friend Val for advice. At which point Val asks her: tough or fluff?

Does she want god's honest truth, or does she want unconditional support? The protagonist always picks fluff, because she is weak, and this is an obvious mistake. But I think Val makes an even bigger mistake by asking someone what they need when it comes to honesty.

There is a perfect world out there where absolute truth exists, but in our imperfect world, truth appears to be quite relative. Yes, we have a court system and a rule of law, but even then it is all about what you can prove, not what actually happened. All you need in life is a good lawyer to have decent chances against the law.

I lied a lot to my parents as a kid, as most kids do, and my father would always act so disappointed when he caught me in a lie. I would feel bad because it appeared to me that my father never lied, and he’s a very honest man. He did in fact lie just as much as the rest of us, about 10 percent of the time. But he only lied to other people, he never lied to us, and he NEVER said anything like this:

“No honey, you don't look fat.”
“Oh yes, your chicken parm was really good last night, I just had a stomachache so I couldn't eat so much.”
“Yes, you are the best I ever had. You're the hottest.”

Sound familiar? If you like to keep the peace in a relationship, like I do, you fluff a lot. Pure unconditional support. I don't think there is anything wrong with that, but my father never hid the truth from us.

If we sucked at something my dad would always tell us. If my mom made something that didn't taste so good, he would tell her right away. If I started to look a little pudgy, he would be the first to call me out. He was a grade-A dick.

Compare that to how he would act when it wasn't his family involved. All fluff! My cousin could be 200 lbs. overweight but he would say, “No you look good! Don't worry about it! You're going to achieve all your dreams.”

Fuck off, dad.

This kind of behavior can aggravate a child and cause deep intergenerational trauma. But, from where I'm sitting right now, I get it. You should fluff people you only see once in a while. You want to make them feel good. It is not your job to tell acquaintances how to live their lives. No matter how obvious the solutions might be, it is not your place. But when it comes to your own family, the people that you know better than anyone else, you should always go with the brutal truth.

What is the benefit of telling your spouse that their cooking is good when in fact it sucks? You are the one who has to eat it! Why would you want to eat bad food forever? This is something I have tried to incorporate into my relationships.

Do I lie sometimes to get out of uncomfortable conversations? Yes, I am human, but I am working on it. If you want any relationship to work out for any decent amount of time, you have to tell your partner the god's honest truth literally all the time. You get nowhere fluffing. They might hate you for a while, even a long while, but if you tell them the actual truth there can be actual change, which will result in actual peace, not a ticking time bomb.

Oh, one more thing. My father used to toughen me and my sister up, but would he allow us to toughen him up? Could we tell him when we didn't like something with brutal honesty? We could not. That's not how parenting works. But my mother could. And she was such a savant that she only toughened up my father when things were going....well!

She never pulled out the tough card when things were tough for the family. That would inject more volatility into an already volatile situation, and that doesn't work. It was the good times when she would slip in all her suggestions and brutal truth.

My mom is a fucking genius.

So, tough or fluff? I think overall we should use the tough card 80% of the time. Use it almost exclusively with the people we are closest to and when times are good. And we should fluff it up with the people that we don't really know that well or if they’re going through it. Tell your husband he has to hit the gym…but only after he gets a promotion.