Sometimes it’s better just to be honest with people even if it’s going to hurt their feelings.
This is what I realized the other day when I accidentally caused a major fight between me and my boyfriend.
I was only trying to protect his sensitive emotions but I think that I made things much worse in my efforts to be considerate. You see, my boyfriend had been talking about going to a movie for the past 6 months that I had no interest in. He was watching the trailers obsessively and continuously talking about his hopes for the new production. On the day that it was released, I did not want to attend the movie with him. That’s when I lied and told him that my heating and cooling system had broken down unexpectedly at my house. I did my best to feign complete exasperation over the broken air conditioning unit and my need for a professional heating, cooling, and ventilation specialist. I even went so far as to talk about what a financial burden it was going to be for the emergency repair service that day. I told him I was concerned that there might be something majorly wrong with my air conditioning unit and I would have to pay for expensive replacement parts and hourly HVAC technician fees. I even started pricing out new air conditioning units to make the entire story extra believable. About half an hour after we got off the phone, the jig was up. My boyfriend actually chose my HVAC emergency over his movie release and came over to my house to wait for the HVAC technician with me. Now I got a lot of ‘splaining to do.