The reason, the motivation, is critical to not only how it's viewed but perspective. Chances are what she is driving you to may be part of the very reason she's lying in attempts to prevent it.
The motivation is to make the next ten minutes of her life easier, always has been. The big lies have never been in our marriage, we have been faithful and we have met our highest hurdles together, willingly, and honestly.
But, the small lies that drive the wedge between us have become so easy for her to drop on me, that's how they feel, like she dropped it and now we both lower our gaze and look at it, both of us knowing it was a lie and the wedge has been driven further between us and that's that. She gets an easier ten minutes as soon as I go away, I get the next day week month feeling like I deserved it, after all I was dumb enough to be standing there when it was dropped.
I have heard the argument that she lies because she is afraid of my anger ( and I have anger like only a PTSD suffering person can understand) but it is a fallacious argument because my anger for her is
only for the lies. It doesn't ring true that the lies are to avoid the anger caused by the lies.
Sometimes anxiety, sometimes substance abuse, or painkiller addiction, sometimes they don't (or can't) remember, there's even the existence coined now of fight-flight-or fib
Substance abuse and addiction are huge players in her problem.
All smokers quit eventually. Her mother quit when pneumonia put her in her deathbed. Her friends, her relatives, lots of them are now dead ex smokers.
I have seen too many corpses that could be described simply as "ex-smokers" and that's all I ever knew about them. They didn't wake up, the ambulance was called, the first responders were sent and were first on the scene, we guided the ambulance to the home, we helped with whatever came next, even if it was cut the crew loose and stay on scene until the sheriff came and cleaned out the medicine chest or the coroner showed up and we carried the weight for him. Many many times.
Tobacco is probably the last product the world will allow to legally do nothing but addict the users and eventually kill them. We all get excited about mass shootings and the highway death toll and twenty other life threatening things we all deal with, but smoking and vaping continue to fly under the social radar and selectively eliminate those of us who choose to let an addiction cloud our judgement.
An interesting thing- I recently heard that it has been shown that the parts of our brain that are involved when thinking about another person are also the same parts of our brain that are involved when thinking about our future selves. In other words, the way I think about the difference between my concerns and your concerns is the same way I think about the difference between my concerns and my future concerns.
I would add that PTSD sufferers like my wife and I (left that out until now, didn't I) have an even wider separation because many of us have the symptom of feeling a sense of a shortened or unimaginable future.
For me, I have worked hard every working day and most of my days left over since I was 14. A whole lot of that was just getting to another rent check and groceries, but a whole lot has been working for a future that has come more and more into focus as I get closer to retirement.
For her, she doesn't understand that the addiction will likely take away her chance to see her granddaughters graduation. It may take away seeing her grandsons (five of the little guys) first days of school, their little league games, their first crushes.
I know she wants to see all of those things and more, but the next ten minutes of present self are as distinctly separate from her future self, its as if someone other than her future self will have these years of smoking in their history.
And I know all too well that she probably will be another dead ex-smoker, getting removed from wherever she dies by some first responder or ambulance crew or coroner.
So, the ability to lie to make the next ten minutes is a well worn path she pretty much walks all day, every day. And just a little question like "did the dogs get fed" will send her down the path and the answer is yes, and now the next ten minutes are easier. Unless I have reason to go to the utility room and see empty dishes because she didn't feed them and forgot or didn't have time to cover the lie, and all of the anger I harbor for all of the dishonesty comes to bear on her and on me, because I leaned into the gut punch by asking a simple pass the day along question that a man and wife should be able to handle without fear or resentment. the lesson: feed the dogs, don't ask.
See her smoking after she lied to me and her surgeon and hurt her chances of getting through a hip replacement without infection by smoking: Dont say you saw it, don't try to stop it, don't ask how the cessation classes are going, dont ask if I smell it on her, don't ask about the hidden lighter I found, just know it will be a lie if you even get a response and know you have done what you can do for a couple of decades and if two extra hip replacements and a recovery from a life threatening touch and go infection and almost two years in a wheel chair didn't give her a sense of having a future that suffers for the acts of the past, nothing will.
I have that sense, I know that confronting anything hard with her, anything harder than "are you doing the dishes or am I" will get me the answer that carries the potential for making the next few hours of my life a struggle to hold back the anger that may someday see me in a divorce lawyers office or a cheap hotel. I do the dishes. I don't ask.
Did you get gas while you were in town? Why do you need me to bring you gas? The gauge said you had gas? show me.
Nope. get the gas, go to the place, consider making getting the gas for her just another part of buying, insuring and maintaining the car for her. let her have the easy ten.
And have a place to sleep and be able to keep what you have earned, that's the carrot that dangles for me.
