Lying to someone you love is uncomfortable to admit. Doing it anyway, and then telling yourself it was for their benefit, is apparently very common.
A new University of Copenhagen study, published in Personal Relationships, asked 656 adults to describe a time they’d been dishonest with a romantic partner. What researchers got back wasn’t a collection of dramatic betrayals. Most of it was mundane—hidden spending, faked enthusiasm, omitted details—the everyday architecture of a relationship that looks fine from the outside.
Researchers categorized the dishonesty into four buckets: outright lies, withheld information, behavioral deception like deleted texts and performed normalcy, and infidelity, which they defined broadly enough to cover emotional affairs and sexting. The topics people lied about most broke down into eight areas, money and sex chief among them. One participant copped to lying about his paycheck “on numerous occasions.”
A woman described faking orgasms out of what she called a “pressure to pretend” and not enough energy to have the conversation. One man kept a serious kidney condition from his wife for years, certain her family would have killed the relationship if they’d found out.
People Lie to Their Partners to ‘Protect’ Them, but a New Study Says It Still Damages the Relationship
The part that surprised the researchers was how little motivation changed the outcome. They drew a distinction between self-protective lying and what they deliberately labeled “alleged” partner-protective lying. The qualifier was intentional: only the person who lied knows whether protecting their partner was the actual reason or just a more flattering story to tell afterward. Either way, the damage to the relationship looked about the same. Good intentions did not appear to soften the result.
A separate 2026 study in the Journal of Social Psychology added a wrinkle. People in struggling relationships didn’t necessarily want the truth—they wanted to feel better, and comforting dishonesty did that job. The less satisfied someone was in their relationship, the more likely they were to prefer being lied to. Which means both people can end up lying to protect each other, both sensing something is wrong, neither saying anything, and the whole thing slowly caving in on itself.
The researchers identified a pattern they called “The Slowburn”: the short-lived relief of a successful lie, followed by weeks or months of guilt, withdrawal, and creeping suspicion about what the partner might be hiding in return. The lie didn’t have to surface for any of it to kick in. A minority of accounts went the other way—getting caught opened up conversations people had been dodging, and some said the relationship improved as a result. The researchers called that “The Repaired Bond.” It was the less common outcome by a significant margin.
Most accounts didn’t end well. Trust broke down, people pulled away, and relationships ended. As one participant said, “trust is the glue.” When it goes, everything goes with it.
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