signs of compulsive lying — 5 i kept noticing

it is currently 11:23am on a thursday. i’m at my desk, technically working. carla is in the all-hands on the third floor — the one with mandatory attendance and optional listening. the company pays me by the hour. these are the hours. and what i am doing in these hours, against any reasonable interpretation of my contract, is sitting here trying to remember every sign of compulsive lying the ex showed me before i learned what to call it.

at my desk. the all-hands is loud through the wall. i have, i estimate, fifty minutes before they shake hands and pretend the meeting was useful.

so. signs of compulsive lying. i have been told i’m bad at spotting these. that was true. it was, i now suspect, told to me by someone who benefited from it being true. that’s the loop, isn’t it. anyway, the working list. five signs. some of them you’ve seen. some of them, possibly, you’ve performed.

signs of compulsive lying — the short list. the compulsive liar tends to: (1) say “i’m fine” with a small, perfect cadence; (2) use evidence — receipts, screenshots, timestamps — as alibi rather than fact; (3) say “i sent it” with the same flat tone every time; (4) propose plans they will never honor (“we should grab coffee”); (5) smile at the wrong moment, especially when the bill arrives. one is a thursday. five is a pattern.

SIGNS. ARE. NOT. PROOF. SIGNS. ARE. PROBABILITY.

that goes on the wall before we go further. nothing on this list is a clinical diagnosis, and i am not the man for that anyway. i am a man at a desk who has, on a long enough timeline, met the type. these are the signs of compulsive lying you start to notice, after the fourth or fifth time, in the order you would, if you were paying attention. think of it less as a checklist and more as a familiar smell — once you know it, you know it. it is, frankly, the same smell my ex used to deploy on a thursday, just packaged for outside the relationship.

signs of compulsive lying, the working list

the list, in long form, with the small print my desk allows for. these are not hypothetical. these are observed — observed by me, on me, and around me. for context, the cinematic example most people reach for is the 2002 film “catch me if you can”, in which a teenager flies airplanes he does not own and cashes cheques that do not exist. that is not what this list is. this list is the smaller, quieter, in-your-kitchen version. the list does not require five out of five. one of them, on its own, is a thursday. three of them, in the same person, in the same month, is a working hypothesis. i would not, in a court of law, recommend acting on five out of five. i would, however, in a kitchen at 9:42pm, trust the data.

sign one, the perfect “i’m fine”

the perfect “i’m fine” is a small thing. it has the right number of syllables, the right tone, the right beat between the question and the answer. it is, on the surface, the most reasonable sentence in the english language. it is also, for the compulsive liar, the cleanest one — because it has been said five thousand times and is, by now, a reflex.

the giveaway is the cadence. the truthful “i’m fine” wobbles. it has a sigh in it, or a laugh, or a “well, mostly”. the rehearsed one is too even. it sounds like a recording. you can clip it from a hundred conversations and play them back and they all match. that’s the sign. fluency.

sign two, the receipt wallet as alibi

this is a small one but it tracks. the compulsive liar tends to keep a receipt wallet — paper, digital, sometimes both — not for taxes, not for budgeting, but for retrieval. they pull a receipt out of a wallet not to know what they spent but to establish where they were. the receipt is the alibi.

i had a receipt wallet for a year, by the way. i was not lying. i was, however, copying behaviour i had recently been on the receiving end of, which is its own kind of small data. the wallet went into a drawer in march. the drawer is now full of receipts that prove nothing because nobody has asked. that’s the difference. the compulsive liar’s receipts get asked about. mine, never.

sign three, the rehearsed “i sent it”

“i sent it” should, in theory, be the easiest claim in the world to verify. it is, in theory. in practice, the compulsive liar has worked out — possibly without naming it — that nobody, in fact, checks. you say “i sent it”, the other person says “i didn’t get it”, you say “weird, must have bounced, i’ll resend”, and the conversation moves on. the original send never happened. nobody asks for the bounce-back email. the loop closes. the receipt drawer thickens.

the giveaway is the flatness. the truthful “i sent it” has a small irritation in it — the sender is annoyed the receiver didn’t get it. the rehearsed one is calm. it has the cadence of someone reading a card. you’ll start to recognise it. once you do, it is everywhere. it is in your inbox. it might, occasionally, be in your outbox.

sign four, the “we should grab coffee” that never happens

this one is mostly harmless until it isn’t. “we should grab coffee” is the universal closer of the english-speaking world. for most people, it is a polite signal that the conversation is ending. for the compulsive liar, it is a signal the conversation is ending and the appearance of follow-through is being secured at the same time. two birds. one phrase.

the test is the second invitation. mention a specific day. specify a specific place. write it down. the truthful “we should grab coffee” turns into a coffee. the rehearsed one turns into a “i’d love to but” that has been pre-formed since before they said it the first time.

i have, in my phone, a list of every “we should grab coffee” said to me in 2023. it is, conservatively, fourteen entries. coffees that actually occurred: two. one of them was, in fact, accidental — we were already in the cafe.

sign five, the small smile during the bill

this one took me years. the compulsive liar tends to react slightly wrong to the bill at restaurants. they get a small private smile, like they have just remembered a joke. it is not the smile of a person enjoying their evening. it is the smile of a person calculating something. probably whether to round up, round down, or claim they “got the next one”, knowing there will not be a next one.

which brings me, briefly, to my own private theory of tipping, which i hold with unjustified confidence: tipping should be a flat 12%. always. everywhere. no math. no judgment. no theatre. people who can do percentages quickly are showing off. people who tip 22% are buying a feeling. people who tip 8% are, statistically, the same people doing all the other small lies. the flat 12% removes the moral test from a meal. i will be writing a manifesto. nobody asked.

back to the bill. watch the smile. watch the second when the receipt arrives. that’s the second the compulsive liar is most themselves. they are, in that moment, doing math nobody else is doing.

verdict — the signs are politeness wearing a coat

the all-hands let out. carla is back. she has a small piece of cake on a napkin. somebody had a birthday. i was not invited. that’s fine. that’s its own data.

the third yoga mat is, technically, propping up the standing desk leg. that’s how the seventh microwave got involved. but those are stories for another desk. the bill, by the way, on the lunch i had on monday, came to £14.40. i tipped £1.73. that’s 12%. i had to use the calculator on my phone. i am not, in fact, faster than other people at percentages. i just hold the principle harder.

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