Honesty is considered the foundation of any couple, and that is hard to argue with. But there is a kind of honesty after which the house goes cold and conversations turn into a contest over who was more accurate. On how truth turns into a weapon and what replaces it, Peruquois, a top World Music performer in Australia, a musician, composer, author and facilitator of personal development trainings for women.
Honesty mixed with righteousness
There are people with a very strongly swung sense of righteousness. Their honesty destroys: it does not build, it does not help anyone get through anything, it simply wipes out everything in its path.
The mechanism is simple. The person really does see accurately. He names what he sees at once and out loud, and formally he is right. The purpose of saying it, though, stopped being clarity a long time ago.
Peruquois knows this state from the inside.
“Once, long ago, I was in love too. And we were both these sharp-sword types. And so we dueled on honesty,” she says.
Then she describes what comes of it. “And a great deal of ego and competitiveness appears in the relationship. Who is more right now about what I see, because I am so honest, I am such, I see, I name it immediately and I shoot immediately.”
And she diagnoses the whole construction on the spot: “Not a very loving space, is it.”
Relationships like that look utterly sincere. Nothing is withheld, every thought gets spoken the moment it arrives. And the space between the two people becomes steadily more dangerous, and each of them gradually stops bringing anything alive into it.
A new understanding of honesty
“Probably the wisdom that came to me with the years gave me a new understanding of honesty,” says Peruquois.
The essence of it is to stay honest and at the same time carry your message with love, with respect, and with the right intent for that specific situation and that specific moment.
Three things work together here. The content stays the same, the truth does not go anywhere. What changes is the feeling it is spoken with and the minute it is spoken in.
She names the reason plainly. Intimacy is complete openness to one another, and it is deeply vulnerable. The heart, the body, everything sexual in a person is made tenderly, as love itself is. Material like that cannot be approached with a sword.
Silence is not honesty either
Here Peruquois speaks about the other pole, the one women fall into more often.
Many do not share honestly because they are afraid. Afraid the man will think she has become less desirable. Afraid he will decide she wants something from him. Afraid of being vulnerable and afraid of wounding him. And so they keep it all inside.
“That is not honesty,” says Peruquois. And she adds what it leads to: silence like that helps neither intimacy nor sexuality, and it makes closeness decidedly shallow.
So both of the usual ways of handling truth impoverish a couple: in one it is released as a charge, in the other it is locked away entirely.
Soft honesty
“Many subjects, and all the more those that touch trust, love, intimacy, sexuality, particularly require softness, attention, the ability not only to speak but to hear,” says Peruquois. This is what she calls very soft honesty.
The second word weighs as much as the first. To hear means to withstand someone else's truth without rushing to defend yourself in the same second.
She also describes something that took her a long time to get used to. Sometimes when she speaks, her husband does not comment on it right away. He simply listens and takes it in. She explains it by saying men digest information differently: instead of arguing, a person looks for the answer and brings it later. Another man in his place would defend his position, sometimes aggressively, and everyone has their own history here.
What to remember in a couple
Honesty in a relationship is measured by what happens to the love after the words. The same truth, spoken from different states, does two opposite things: it opens two people to each other, or it adds one more inch of armor.
It is worth checking yourself with one question asked before the conversation: do I want to be closer right now, or do I want to be right. The answer is usually known immediately.
If you want to understand which states you live and speak from and what governs them, take Peruquois's course Your Solar System.
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