Not All Fibs Are Equal: Three Distinct Styles of Bending the Truth With a Partner

Everyone lies to a partner sometimes. The white lie about the haircut, the enthusiasm faked for an in-law's cooking, the small omission that keeps an evening pleasant — these are so ordinary that treating all deception as a single moral failing tells us almost nothing useful. The more interesting question is not whether people bend the truth in relationships but how, and whether those styles cluster into recognizable types. New research suggests they do, and that the differences between them line up with how happy people are with each other.

The work comes from Tim Cole and Kellie Stonebrook at DePaul University, who tackled romantic deception across a pair of connected studies rather than a single survey [1][2]. The first study did the unglamorous but essential work of building and validating a way to measure the motives behind lying to a partner, moving through samples of 926, then 740, then 549 adults [1]. The second study, with 567 people who were married or in committed relationships, put that measure to work [2]. This group was notably not a batch of undergraduates: the average participant was around 42, in relationships lasting more than fourteen years on average, with a near-even split of men and women. That maturity matters, because it means the findings describe established partnerships rather than the churn of early dating.

To find the types, the researchers used a technique called latent profile analysis. Rather than deciding in advance how many kinds of liars exist, the method lets natural groupings emerge from the data, sorting people by the pattern of motives they endorse. Three profiles surfaced, and they are easy to recognize once named [2].

The largest healthy group, about 38 percent, were what the authors call transparent partners. These are people who rarely lean on deception at all. They tended to be securely attached — comfortable with closeness, not braced for rejection — and they reported the highest relationship satisfaction of any group. Their honesty is not performative; it seems to flow from a basic ease in the relationship.

The biggest group overall, at roughly 48 percent, were the strategic soothers. These are not cold manipulators. They bend the truth mainly to keep things smooth — to avoid a needless fight, to spare a partner's feelings, to smooth over friction that they judge not worth the cost of full disclosure. Their satisfaction landed in the middle. This is deception in the service of harmony, the kind most of us would recognize in ourselves, and the study's numbers suggest it is the single most common way people actually operate.

The third and smallest group, about 14 percent, were the antagonistic strategists. What set them apart was breadth: they endorsed the full range of reasons for deceiving a partner, including the self-serving and potentially harmful ones, not just the peace-keeping variety. This group reported the lowest relationship satisfaction, and the distance between them and the transparent partners was striking — a gap the researchers measured at more than two standard deviations [2]. In the language of statistics, that is not a subtle nudge but a chasm. Whatever this pattern of deception reflects, it travels with a markedly less happy relationship.

It is tempting to read that last finding as proof that lying wrecks relationships, but the study is careful, and so should we be. This is correlational research built on self-report gathered at a single moment. It can show that a broad, self-serving style of deception goes hand in hand with dissatisfaction, but it cannot untangle the direction of the arrow. Perhaps wide-ranging deception corrodes a bond over time; perhaps an already-souring relationship breeds more of it, and more varied kinds; perhaps some third factor, like a general disposition, feeds both at once. The design cannot say. There is also the awkward fact that this is research about lying that relies on people honestly reporting their own lying — a limit the authors cannot fully escape, and one worth holding in mind. And the three profiles are patterns across a group, not fixed identities; a real person might drift between soothing and transparency depending on the day and the stakes.

With those cautions in place, the reframing is genuinely useful. Lumping all deception together flattens something that clearly has texture. Most people who bend the truth with a partner are not villains; they are soothers, trading small honesties for a quieter home, and the securely happy tend to need that trade least of all. The rarer and more corrosive pattern is not the occasional white lie but a broad willingness to deceive for one's own ends. The link between how secure someone feels and how they behave toward a partner runs through other research too, including work on how relationship style shapes even our private daydreams about the future. For more on the behavior behind our closest bonds, browse more psychology coverage.

Sources

1. Cole, T., & Stonebrook, K. (2026). Deceptive Hearts: Insecure Attachment and Motives Underlying Deception in Romantic Relationships. Personal Relationships. https://doi.org/10.1111/pere.70020
2. Cole, T., & Stonebrook, K. (2026). Strategic Soothers, Transparent Partners, and Antagonistic Strategists: A Latent Profile Analysis of Romantic Deception. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075261456365
3. DePaul University, College of Communication. https://communication.depaul.edu/

This article summarizes published research for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice.