So, my dog ate a ten dollar bill in the prosperity corner of my house the other day- and I will get to the relevance of this somewhat inconsequential travesty in a minute but first, my question for this post: How do I know if someone is telling the truth?!

Distinguishing Between The Truth And A Lie

It’s all well and good to ask something you just met an important question, like ‘Are you married?’ or ‘Do you have an STD?’ but if they lie about the answer, it’ll render your fact-finding mission null and void! The short answer is—you really can’t—so my nutshell advice is: don’t sleep with them until you find out for sure! And even then, there are thirteen or so other questions you need to know before you even consider entering into that sacred contract and dropping your drawers! That’s right. It should be much more of a process than we often make it out to be.

So back to the dog: So I see this crumpled up thing—it’s green. Does not resemble regular puppy paraphernalia from a distance. I hone in and as I get closer I realize it looks suspiciously like money. I lean down to reclaim what turns out to be a tattered half of a ten dollar bill. I look round for the rest and find a few other scraps that match and now I am on a mission to reconstruct this note—to no avail, I am afraid. (Fortunately, my 17-year-old walked in and informed me casually that as long as I have 52% or more of it the bill, I could take it to the bank and get the full value in exchange.) Suddenly am left to ponder why dogs seem to have so little discrimination— I ended up telling myself, “She’s a dog, that’s what they do” and left it at that. Number one, because I couldn’t ask her, and number two, it wasn’t something I cared enough about to waste any more time over.

So what does this have to do with the earlier question which is, how will you know when someone is telling you the truth? Well, unlike my dog, the person you are interviewing as a potential partner can speak (although sometimes you may wonder if they, in fact, can — but unlike my dog, you cannot come to conclusions about who they are and why they do things as easily – at least not without potentially putting yourself in harm’s way.

If my dog COULD speak, and I asked her why she ate the money, being a dog she would probably say ‘cause it was there. As for your interviewees, they have brains that have well-developed behavior patterns and strong personality tendencies to go with them, and it is your job to take care to research whether or not what this person does and says match. THIS is how you can not only determine if they’re telling the truth, but determine what type of people they are: trustworthy, honest, liars, sneaky, etc.

Would You Rather Dare?

In real life when it comes to human beings, you will have to take this kind of vigilance and commitment over time—and bottom line, that’s what it takes to know if people are who they say they are! You must train yourself to watch what people say and what they do and make sure they match (before you drop your drawers). The good news is, we all have a few basic abilities that make us able to do this:

1). Our intuition, that gut feeling, whatever you want to call it, when you know or suspect or guess, deep down, something is or isn’t right.

2). We have the abilities to be logical and reasonable and we must use these skills to determine what our next steps will be with a potential partner.

The bad news is, too many of us have pushed these skills, intuition and reason down, down, down until we’re not used to listening to and trusting ourselves. And that makes it hard to determine if we should trust somebody else!