One of my readers from Australia recently wrote:

My girlfriend (who is basically my wife, we’ve lived together for 4 years now) said what I thought was the oddest thing two nights ago just as I was about to get into bed beside her. She said, “You should lie more.” I’ve never heard a woman say that before and it shocked me, as it goes completely against what I’ve been led to believe (by media, relationship counseling etc) that women always want a man to tell the truth. We discussed it and when she explained her rationale I could totally see where she was coming from, whereby she reckoned I have been hurting people in the past year by being too honest and telling them exactly what I think (particularly some friends), thus jeopardizing my relationships with them, when it would have been much better for all concerned if I simply told a little lie.

To which I replied with Mark…

If your two-year-old child lies, Dr. Kang Lee of the University of Toronto has found, she or he is likely to be more successful in life—and, loosely speaking, the better she lies, the smarter she’s likely to be. This is big news in the lying literature, not only because toddler-age liars are smarter (though to me, that seems somehow obvious), but because for years psychologists had taken for granted that human beings simply couldn’t lie before the age of four, at the earliest.

“Did these people never reproduce?” one wants to ask–but many new truths about infants and children will doubtless be revealed as more and more scientists become more and more active parents, whether it is more women becoming scientists, or male scientists spending more time caring for the kids. Furthermore, on the subject of parenting, Dr. Victoria Talwar (of McGill University) has shown that children…

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. For scientists who work on the subject, this is no longer the popular model for thinking about grief, but it is so close to the familiar cycle we go through when suffering heartbreak that it is hard to imagine Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross did not have the loss of love as squarely in mind, when she proposed her five stages, as the loss through death of a loved one.

The difference, of course, is that in love lost, the lost beloved goes on living: you imagine how she looks at him, twisting her hair around her finger at her ear; how his eyes change when he sees her; how she supposes she knows him so well, while you know that, in Tori Amos’s words, you “knew him, better, better, better.” And while you might feel like tearing out your own eyes with grief at your inability to ever again speak to a loved one who has died, at least…