What the Hell is “Trickle-Truthing”?
Imagine you’re sitting at home one day when a friend messages you to let you know that they’ve just seen your partner’s profile on Tinder, and the photos look fairly recent. You and your partner have an agreement to be monogamous, and being on Tinder is definitely not part of the deal.
So you confront your partner, and ask them outright if they made a Tinder profile. They deny it, and act as shocked as you are; they tell you that someone must have stolen their photos from social media to make a fake account. They seem pretty sincere about the whole thing and they aren’t budging on their story, so you decide to drop the subject.
Just to be sure, though, you ask your friend if they have any screenshots of the profile, and they send some to you. Right away, you notice that several of the photos are not on your partner’s social media pages, and the story they gave you can’t possibly be true. So you confront your partner again, this time with screenshots in hand. After an hour of insisting that they have no idea how the profile came to be, they cave in and tell you that their friend actually made the profile to pretend to be them. They insist that it was all just a big joke, that the account was never actually used, and they they didn’t tell you because they thought you’d get angry with them.Something still doesn’t sit right with you, though, so you message your partner’s friend to ask about the profile. They have no idea what you’re talking about. You go back to your partner a third time with this new information, and after two more hours of playing dumb, they finally admit that it was their profile after all, but swear that they only made it because they were bored and wanted to see how many matches they’d get to boost their ego. They insist that they had no intention of ever meeting anyone.
At this point, you are very suspicious, so you keep pressing your partner about the issue. After two days of denials, they admit that they were chatting with several other people, but claim they never met up with anyone.
You lose your patience and ask to see their phone, and two more hours of arguing later, they break down and admit that they met up and slept with someone else.
You’ve just experience “trickle-truth”.
As you might have guessed “trickle-truthing” is a practice where a person slowly and gradually reveals the truth to you over a long period of time, while still keeping as much of the lie intact as they can for as long as possible. Getting the ‘full truth’ - or as much of the full truth as they are ultimately willing to reveal - out of them is a long and painstaking process, and often involves repeatedly confronting them with evidence that they’re lying. It’s exhausting for the person who is being lied to, and you can never be entirely certain when you’ve actually arrived at the full truth.A person who gives you a trickle-truth does not respect your intelligence. The stories that they expect you to believe are often full-on ridiculous, and they will try to keep them going for as long as possible, even after you’ve presented them will evidence that their story is false. They look you straight in the face and lie over and over again, revealing a small crumb of truth only when they think it can get you off their back. But you only get those crumbs if you persist long enough - the other person will keep feigning ignorance and keep denying the proof right in front of their eyes, thinking that you’ll be dumb enough to buy their version of events if they tell you the same story enough times.
A person who trickle-truths is also not serious about taking accountability for their actions, and there’s a good chance they aren’t actually sorry for what they did. If they truly regretted it, they would have admitted to their actions the first time you confronted them - instead, they chose to see if they could keep getting away with it. People who trickle-truth will often try to defend themselves by claiming that they were too “scared” to tell the truth, or that they “told you the truth in the end”, but they should not be allowed to get away with it - they get no credit for honesty, and they don’t get to claim that it’s your fault they hid the truth from you. They had an opportunity to come clean, and they did not take it.
It’s hard to trust someone who tells you 5 or 6 stories before getting to the truth, and you are well within your rights to decide that you can never trust that person again. After all, there’s no way of knowing that version 6 is the whole story - maybe there’s a version 7 or a version 8 still to come, and it’s not your responsibility to keep digging to find out. You deserve someone you can trust, and a person who makes you relentlessly fight them for the truth is not that person.
(via missmentelle)
