Excerpt from “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” by Adrienne Rich
Excerpt from “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”
by Adrienne Rich
An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
This originally came to me from Maria Popova’s brilliant Marginalian. I love this text so much that I used this as part of my wedding vows in my 3rd marriage. And that’s about all I’ll say about that here, but I do firmly believe in this concept of any human relationship being one of refining the truths that we can tell each other, and the reasons are so gorgeous — we grow in company, we need others to do justice to our own complexity, and we need companionship along the path in this life.
This piece has a feminist context worth nothing. The essay was first delivered at the Hartwick Women Writers' Workshop in June 1975 — Rich at forty-six, was working out the ethical-political-relational claims that would shape her work for the next thirty years. The essay's larger argument is that lying — particularly the lying women have been culturally trained into — is a form of violence against intimacy, and that telling the truth, however slow and partial, is the actual labor of love.
