Can you believe your sexual partner when he or she tells you that you are the first, and the one and only? Can you really be sure when your partner seems as if they have just experienced the most earth-shattering orgasm during sex with you? Maybe, but don’t be too sure.
Research indicates that 85% of individuals have lied to their relationship partner regarding their involvement with some other person, such as having engaged in sex with someone outside of the relationship (Saxe, 1991). In fact, 92% of college students acknowledge that they have lied at least once to a partner. The most common “mistruths” concern the number of people with whom one has previously had sex (31% say they have not told the truth about that issue; “One or two others? Yeah, okay . . . we’ll go with that number”), having experienced an orgasm (26%), commending one’s partner as the best ever (18%), assuring the partner that the sex was good (18%), telling the partner they love him or her (17%), or claiming to be a virgin (8%; Knox, Schacht, Holt, & Turner, 1993). Beyond these issues, substantial proportions of individuals infected with HIV do not inform their primary partner of their status (12 to 33%; Sullivan, 2005), 38% of those with genital herpes do not (Green et al., 2003), and 69% of those with human papillomavirus (HPV) do not (Keller, Von Sadovsky, Pankratz, & Hermsen, 2000).
Maybe it isn’t extremely surprising, but people will also actually lie so that a potential partner will have sex with them. Over a third of men and a tenth of women have reported that they lied to a partner so that they would have sex with them (Cochran & Mays, 1990).
Recent research by William Marelich and his colleagues (Marelich, Lundquist, Painter, & Mechanic, 2008) found that sexual lies or deceptions, according to statistical analyses, fall into three categories: blatant deception, self-serving deception, and deception to avoid confrontation. Examples of blatant deception include telling “. . . someone ‘I love you’ but really didn’t just to have sex with them” and “had sex with someone just so you could tell your friends about it.” Self-serving lies include “had sex with someone to get resources from them (e.g., money, clothes, companionship)” and “had sex with someone so you would have someone to sleep next to.” Deception to avoid confrontation consists of, among other examples, “had sex even though you didn’t want to” and “had sex with someone in order to maintain your relationship with them.”
In this study, the most frequent type of deception was avoiding confrontation, with 51% of study respondents indicating that they have had sex with someone because they wanted to please their partner. Also, individuals had sex with someone even though they didn’t want to (27%), although this item does not really indicate the reason they had sex even though they didn’t want to. Women were more likely to report having engaged in these relationship maintaining strategies, most likely intended to avoid disappointing their partner and sidestepping situations that might destablilize and threaten relationships. In contrast, men were more likely to engage in blatant types of deception, aimed at getting a partner to engage in sex with them. Women and men, however, were not different in their tendency to employ self-serving deception strategies; this type of strategy is consistent with the social exchange view of interpersonal relationships discussed in Chapters 9 and 10 of the textbook.
Cochran, S. D., & Mays, V. M. (1990). Sex, lies, and HIV. New England Journal of Medicine, 322, 774-775.
Green, J., Ferrier, S., Kocsis, A., Shadrick, J., Ukoumunne, O. C., Murphy, S., & Hetherton, J. (2003). Determinants of disclosure of genital herpes to partners. Sexually Transmitted Infections, 79, 42-44.
Keller, M. L., Von Sadovsky, V., Pankratz, B., & Hermsen, J. (2000). Self-disclusure of HPV infection to sexual partners. Western Journal of Nursing Research, 22, 285-302.
Knox, D., Schacht, C., Holt, J., & Turner, J. (1993). Sexual lies among university students. College Student Journal, 27, 269-272.
Marelich, W. D., Lundquist, J., Painter, K., & Mechanic, M. B. (2008). Sexual deception as a social-exchange process: Development of a behavior-based sexual deception scale. Journal of Sex Research, 45, 27-35.
Saxe, L. (1991). Lying: Thoughts of an applied social psychologist. American Psychologist, 46, 409-415.
Sullivan, K. M. (2005). Male self-disclosure of HIV-positive serostatus to sex partners: A review of the literature. Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, 16, 33-47.
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