Is Your Spouse Lying? Why Counseling Often Fails

Part 4: What the Science of Deception Tells Us About Getting Help and Getting Healing

Based on The Lies We Tell and the Clues We Miss by Dr. Bella DePaulo

When a marriage is struggling — when something feels deeply wrong, when you suspect deception or have discovered it — two things are almost universally recommended: go to counseling and work toward forgiveness. Both are good instincts. But for marriages where sustained deception or manipulation is present, both face obstacles that most people are never told about. The science of lying helps explain why.

Why the Counseling Room Isn’t a Level Playing Field

Marriage counseling assumes that both people in the room are operating in good faith — that they’re telling the truth about what happened, what they feel, and what they want. For most couples, that’s a reasonable assumption. For marriages involving a manipulative spouse, it isn’t.

DePaulo’s research examined which personality types lie the most. People who scored high on Machiavellianism — defined in her research as an “admitted willingness to use manipulative strategies such as lying and ingratiation, a cynical perspective on human nature, and a lack of concern with conventional morality” — lied significantly more than others and told significantly more self-centered lies. Their worldview is captured in scale items like “Never tell anyone the real reason you did something unless it is useful to do so.” That is not a person who enters a therapist’s office and suddenly becomes transparent.

DePaulo also found that manipulative people are specifically motivated to “mold others to suit their own agendas”. A couples counseling session, for such a person, is simply a new arena with a new audience to manage. The therapist becomes someone to impress, reassure, and strategically mislead — especially one who hasn’t been trained to recognize coercive control dynamics.

The Liar Who Has No Reason to Stop

There’s a second problem, even in marriages where the deception is not rooted in a manipulative personality but in years of practiced habit.

DePaulo’s research found that as lying becomes more frequent and habitual, “lie-telling is likely to become easier, more successful, and more habitual” — and frequent liars come to notice their own lying less and less. Over 70% of liars in her studies said that if they could relive the situation, they would tell the lie again. Not because they had calculated the odds, but because the lie no longer registered as a meaningful moral choice. It had simply become the way they handled things.

This matters enormously for the question of whether counseling can work. Genuine change in a habitual liar would require them to: recognize the full scope of their deception, feel the weight of its impact on you, and develop an internalized discomfort with dishonesty that never formed — or that eroded over years of practice. DePaulo’s research shows that people who tell fewer lies are those who have most deeply internalized honesty as central to their identity. For someone who has done the opposite — who has made lying a default — a few sessions of couples therapy is working against a deeply grooved, largely unconscious habit. That is not a small obstacle. It is a structural one.

Why Forgiveness Takes Longer Than Anyone Tells You

Even if you leave — even if counseling is off the table — you are still likely to be told that forgiveness should come quickly. That holding onto pain is hurting you more than them. That letting go is the spiritually mature response.

What DePaulo’s research adds to this conversation is a picture of just how deep the wound actually is — and it has nothing to do with whether your spouse feels bad about what they did.

Her studies found that ordinary liars — people telling small everyday lies — felt more distress before, during, and after lying to people they loved than to strangers. That finding applies to average people telling average lies. It does not describe habitual, manipulative, or coercive spouses, who, as we saw earlier in Part 1 of this series, lie with decreasing distress over time and often express no remorse at all. If your spouse showed no guilt, no regret, and no meaningful acknowledgment of what they did — that is consistent with what the research predicts for practiced, self-serving liars. Your perception of their coldness is not distorted. It is accurate.

But here is what matters most: the depth of your wound has nothing to do with whether they feel it too. You were deceived by the person your brain was most wired to trust, in the relationship where your truth bias was strongest, across a span of time long enough to reshape your understanding of your own life. And what was lost was not only information. It was intimacy itself — the feeling of being genuinely understood, validated, and cared for. Every sustained lie dismantled that, quietly and invisibly, over time.

And while all of that was happening, the deception was doing something else quietly in the background. DePaulo’s research found that social interactions during which lies are told are rated as less intimate and less pleasant than honest ones. A marriage riddled with deception isn’t just a marriage where bad things happened. It is a marriage where intimacy was being steadily, invisibly hollowed out — interaction by interaction, year by year. Intimacy, in DePaulo’s framework, is built on feeling genuinely understood and validated. Lies make that impossible by definition. When you discovered the deception, you weren’t just discovering individual incidents. You were discovering that the closeness you thought you had was, in part, a fabrication — and that the loneliness or unease you may have felt for years had a reason.

When you finally see the full picture, you are not grieving a single event. You are grieving a version of your marriage — and of your own reality — that has to be rebuilt from the ground up to reflect the truth. That is not a process that happens on anyone else’s timeline. Taking a long time to forgive is not bitterness. It is proportional. It is what honest healing from a real wound looks like.

A note on couples counseling resources: Not all counseling is the same. If deception, manipulation, or abuse is present in your marriage, individual therapy with a trauma-informed counselor is likely safer than joint couples counseling. For more, see my post Why Couples Counseling Can Be Dangerous in Abusive Marriages.

This is Part 4 of the series Is Your Spouse Lying? — based on The Lies We Tell and the Clues We Miss (2009) by Bella DePaulo, social psychologist and deception researcher. To learn more about her study, see Part 3.