Is Radical Honesty Really the Best Policy? What Happened When Love Tested Mine (Exclusive)

The year I exploded my life, my new year’s resolution had been to practice “radical honesty.” That means being 100 percent forthcoming about everything at all times.

As a longtime white liar, I had been throwing around the idea for a while. Before New Year’s Eve, I’d listened to my friend Kassi’s new podcast episode, entitled “Is It Ever OK to Lie?” Kassi had been Harvard’s first meditation adviser, a divinity school graduate of the institution, and a woman I’d turned to when I needed feedback.

Knowing her, I was certain of the answer to her episode’s title already: No.

And I was right.

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“The sexiest thing in the world to me is honesty,” she says in the episode, “even if it means facing consequences. That shows me you have a backbone, you have boundaries, you trust yourself to handle chaos and disagreement, and you trust others to come up with a resolution for you … Lying keeps you small.”

Lies of omission included.

Raising two small children in my 40s, I was overwhelmed and exhausted by so many obligations throughout the day and on the calendar. I’m a socially-inclined introvert who also needs a lot of alone time to charge my weird batteries. But for some reason I could never bring myself to just say, “I won’t be coming to your family gathering because I don’t want to,” which sounded rude. Instead, I’d say something like, “I’m so sorry! I can’t come. I have COVID.” Yes, I’d fake COVID to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. 

As I saw it at the time, I’d lied to create a better situation for others: if I didn’t go to a birthday party because I would rather stay home alone and go surfing, that was rude and inconsiderate — a birthday was once a year, and I could stay home alone and surf any other day — whereas if I told the white lie (COVID, stomach bug, deadlined work assignment) my guilt over not going to the perceived obligation is absolved and I get to do what I want. 

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But “Is Lying Ever OK” called out this behavior. “If I don’t tell a little white lie, I won’t get to do what I want to do,” Kassi says. “ I would lie and tell myself it’s inconsequential.”

This was exactly what I had been doing.

Since childhood, I had been a big fan of the little white lie because I dreaded offending someone or hurting their feelings. Now that I’m raising two little girls of my own, I feared them following the lead of a mom who couldn’t tell it like it is.

Until that New Year’s, I found the concept of resolutions false, believing instead that we set goals when the time comes for them and carry them out based on our own timelines and incentives, not just because the earth completed another revolution around the sun. But I’d had it with lying. I was sick of excuses. I made my first resolution of my 40-odd years of life: Practice Radical Honesty.

Radical honesty came more easily than expected. Turns out, people had a hard time arguing with “No, thank you,” and “I don’t want to.” Telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth felt incredibly liberating. No one hated me just because they saw less of me. I felt less burnout and more aligned with my true priorities. I attended fewer social events, conserved my energy and had more of it. My life didn’t wither. If anything, I felt stronger.

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By August, my eighth month of radical honesty, I was flying high. Kassi was right: “Telling people the truth about ourselves brings us closer. Our minds tell us we will lose someone if we tell the truth, but that’s the same mind that told us to lie in the first place.”

I became a huge radical honesty proponent. I talked about it to anyone who’d listen, as if I’d found religion.

It turned out, though, I was splashing around in the kiddie pool. My radical honesty high didn’t last when the stakes got higher.

In August of 2022 I fell in love with someone who was not my husband: a gentle, soft-spoken surfing buddy. The feelings came on suddenly and all at once. We had been friends who saw each other in the ocean and began sharing stories about who we were on land.

This was far more than a no-thank-you to a social invitation or declining a dessert someone had lovingly made because I’d given up sugar. This was a decade of marriage at stake, what my kids’ lives would look like and who I wanted to be. I had prided myself on becoming someone who no longer lied, but for weeks, I reverted to lying by omission, never mentioning this friend to my husband.

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During that period, I thought about — in the spirit of radical honesty — telling my friend we could not be friends anymore because I was in love with him and married. That thought was heart-crushing.

I told my husband about my feelings instead. He was angry, but he also said, “Find out this guy doesn’t feel the same, so you can move on.”

And so came the second radical honesty test.

The next time I saw my friend in the ocean, I gestured toward him, then back at myself and asked, “Are you feeling this?” I felt certain he’d say, “You’re a married mom, no,” but instead,he told me that his feelings mirrored mine. He’d gotten divorced six years earlier and hadn’t dated much. He’d been waiting around for a soulmate, which he identified as me.

A few weeks later, he invited me to live in his house.

Radical honesty had led me here, so I told myself I should do it.

For the next 11 months, my husband and I divided time with our kids between the house he and I co-owned, and my new one with the surfer. It was complicated and difficult, but I could tell myself, at least I’d been honest. Everything was above-board.

One year later, though, the stress of a two-home lifestyle had become too much for the surfer, the kids and me. He was working on a doctorate and never had children of his own. He welcomed mine, but their anger and outbursts about their parents’ separation made him, an empath, uncomfortable and sad. Despite the good times over the course of that year — beach days, ice cream outings, cozy movie nights — no one was having much fun anymore at all.

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There was radical honesty. There were tears. The current arrangement wasn’t working. We had no idea what would happen, but we didn’t want to jump ship entirely from each other’s lives either. The amount we cared for each other had not decreased. I moved back into my house, to an uncertain future.

I began to think more deeply about radical honesty, musing, This is why people have affairs. I finally understood. If I had not been practicing radical honesty, if the surfer and I had opted to quietly see each other under the table,  maybe our lives wouldn’t have erupted into chaos. But it would also have been difficult and guilt-inducing to lie, cheat and hide; I’d been comfortable telling little white lies, but couldn’t imagine having an affair or even a consensually open relationship.

But I could understand why people did.

I’d grown up with a divorced single mom. My dad died young after a long addiction. I craved and idealized stability for myself and my kids, or at least the idea of it. Now, I’ve begun to think it is a concept, rather than something that really exists.

Perhaps radical honesty was, too.

Another year later, the care the surfer and I share for each other goes unquestioned. We meet for surf sessions and exchange home-cooked meals we’ve prepared. But I don’t talk to my husband about any of it. I no longer think that everyone needs to know everything for my conscience to be clean and my soul to be peaceful. It’s more about accepting that a lot of life is messy and will be.

I still wonder: Is radical honesty always the best policy?

I do think so. But this year, it’s got an asterisk because sometimes, the truth can be more harmful than omission.

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“There are times when keeping your thoughts and opinions to yourself is important,” therapist Jody Wilfong, MM, MT-BC explained to me, “especially if you know those thoughts and opinions can be perceived as hurtful.”

And in “The Case Against Radical Honesty” in Psychology Today, Matt Wotton, MBA and Graham Johnston, MBA write that radical honesty “isn’t always helpful” and, in fact, can lead to “selfish behavior and hurt feelings,” precisely what I set out to avoid when I made the resolution.

This New Year’s, I resolved to follow my intuition, including on when to practice radical honesty and when silence may be golden. 

How does that pan out? Ask me in 2026.

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