If the Truth Be Known, Women on the Road Often Find Themselves Fibbing

I confess. I’m prone to telling little lies when I travel. I sometimes wear a phony wedding band, and I usually fib to strangers about where I’m staying.

In India several years ago, I invented a husband. Men who were pestering me heard all about my tall, athletic spouse, an employee of the U.S. State Department, whom I was about to meet for dinner or lunch.

I justify lies like these by telling myself that they are harmless self-protection in a world where women travelers often are hassled. I think we have a right to do or say whatever works to avoid harassment. My conscience wouldn’t twitch if I told a would-be rapist I was HIV-positive.

Still, one of the first and fundamental lessons my parents taught me was never to lie. And on reflection, I realize that lying, like manipulation, is the last resort of the powerless. It is far better, I know, and actually empowering for women, to keep safe by being assertive and telling the truth when at all possible.

Carolyn Miller, a coauthor of the Lonely Planet guidebook “Belize, Guatemala and Yucatan” (Lonely Planet Publications, 2001), is a travel fibber. She says she always keeps “a few little lies in her pocket” on the road, chiefly to fend off unwanted attention from men. Among those lies, pretending she doesn’t speak Spanish works for her in Central America.

My friend Penny Kaganoff, who travels widely by herself, wearing modest dress and never seeking attention, was bothered by men to the point of distraction several years ago in southern Italy.

“I wasn’t in danger,” she says, “but it was so annoying. I felt I couldn’t enjoy the sights because of them.” At times she played deaf. When that didn’t work, this rabbi’s daughter told harassers she was a nun, prompting one man to leave her in peace as he made the sign of the cross.

The Rev. Mary June Nestler, dean of the Episcopal Theological School at Claremont, says that lying is more ethical than violence in dangerous situations. “If you’re in danger of life and limb, a fair amount of prevarication that doesn’t harm anyone sounds sensible to me,” Nestler says. “I only wish there weren’t the necessity for lying like this.”

I know I’m not the only woman who has planned an HIV defense against rape attack. “It’s not a bad idea,” says Phyliss D’Elia, a detective in the rape special section of the LAPD Robbery Homicide Division. “But what if the perpetrator gets mad and kills you? Unless you know the psychology of the attacker, telling lies could backfire.”

Alicia Dunams of Sacramento says she lied, in a way, while riding a local bus to Royal Chitwan National Park in Nepal. She was by herself, and the male passengers started staring at her and acting forward. So she chatted with them in a steady stream, trying to make it seem as though she wasn’t frightened and that she knew exactly where she was going. Fortunately, the ruse worked. “I don’t like lying,” Dunams says. “It can get you into worse trouble because you always have to cover yourself.”

Maybe there’s no harm in telling little white lies to keep safe. But when you do so while traveling, it’s easy to get comfortable with prevarication and begin lying not for self-protection but to get what you want. I once told a flight attendant that I needed an aisle seat because I had a bladder infection. The lie was justified, I thought, because I had booked an aisle seat. The agent at the check-in counter even confirmed it. Then I boarded the plane and found I was between two women with squirmy toddlers.

I got my aisle seat. How immoral was that?

“It’s all right to lie if no one is going to be harmed and it doesn’t hurt us personally,” says psychotherapist Harriet Lerner, the author of “The Dance of Connection: How to Talk to Someone When You’re Mad, Hurt, Scared, Frustrated, Insulted, Betrayed or Desperate” (HarperCollins, 2001). “But we don’t always know this in advance. What if you took the last aisle seat from someone with a disability?”

A colleague tells a story about how she hurt herself by lying to an airline agent to get a plane home when grounded by a snowstorm in Salt Lake City. She needed to get home because her aunt was dying, but she was so desperate that she upped the ante by saying her mother had just had a stroke. As it turned out, there were no more flights going anywhere that night. So there she sat while the world outside the airport turned white, weeping her heart out partly because of her lie, partly because of her frustration that it didn’t work.

My friend Margaret Fleetwood of Montecito, Calif., is superstitious about telling lies that involve health. “If I said I had a headache, I’m quite convinced I’d get one the next day,” she says. One time in New Orleans, however, she made a carriage driver take her closer to her destination than he wanted. When she got out, she limped to justify her insistence. It makes me laugh just to think about it.

Seriously, though, where does one draw the line when it comes to telling little white traveling lies? My nonexistent husband has proved useful, but he takes on more interesting features every time I pull him out of my hat. “Lying about little things can become habitual and automatic,” Lerner says. “It’s easy to tell one lie to get your way, but it’s hard to tell only one. Over time, the accumulation of small lies can erode your sense of self-esteem.”

I’m drawing the line here and now. No more lies, unless it’s a matter of life or death.