I think of myself as an honest person, but it has come to my attention that I am not an honest person. A woman of my acquaintance used to regularly point this out to me. She would do this not at the top of her lungs, but with an intensity tantamount to yelling.

It's a funny thing about emotional confrontations. What you hear might not be what the other person's saying. You might hear what you're afraid they're saying but aren't. You might even hear what they're trying to say but can't find the words for. There's no such thing as objective fact when emotions are flying around the room; there's only subjectivity, or subjectivities. Perception is everything and 90% of perception in an emotional exchange is misperception, delusion.

Delusion is a great place to have sex. Not seeing the other person as they really are, not knowing much about them, not caring, being able to project onto them any and every thing that floats through your fervid brain at the moment is the psychic equivalent of lube. The deluded mind is free to shape another person into a semblance of a thing you wouldn't mind being caught rubbing yourself against in a frenzy.

At the point of frenzy, of course, it really doesn't matter what you're rubbing yourself against — real, imagined, animate or battery-powered.

But lies will get you to that place faster than honesty — beginning with lies to the self. And the greatest of these is love.

Love is a four-letter word designed to dignify the passionate attraction between individuals. Love is an invention of 13th-century France. Love is an umbrella term for all kinds of misbehavior, including murder. About the only sentence in which the word love can be used without fear of contradiction is one involving a foodstuff, as in, "I love macadamia nuts."

When you tell your friends you're in love, when you tell someone you love her, when you tell yourself the reason you're behaving the way you're behaving is because of love, because you've gotten to the point where nothing else could justify your behavior, you're probably lying. You probably just want sex, but are too ashamed to say so. Or you might want comfort, or tenderness, or sympathy, or understanding, or delight, or wonder, or refreshment of your faith in the human spirit. You might want to spend some time alone with another person who reveals themselves to you and you to yourself.

Or you might actually love.