If your husband lies about small things, here’s why it’s not a small problem. Many women in our community describe the same beginning: they start noticing little lies, inconsistencies, or half-truths, but they dismiss them because, overall, he seems like a good guy. He’s involved. He apologizes. He’s trying. So the lies get minimized, explained away, or pushed aside.

One of the hardest parts of living with deception is that clarity doesn’t usually arrive with a big confession or undeniable proof. It comes in fragments, small moments that are easy to dismiss, especially when your goal is to hold your family together. When a husband lies about small things, it often points to something much bigger, but that pattern can be hard to see while you’re still inside it. In this episode, Anne shares the French Fry Analogy to explain why lying, gaslighting, and blame-shifting about “small things” can be a major red flag.

Before reading on, here’s something many women don’t realize: lying can be an emotional abuse tactic. That truth explains why so many thoughtful, capable women stay confused for so long—not because they’re in denial, but because it’s nearly impossible to see clearly when you’re living in a pattern that alternates between hurtful behavior and reassuring gestures, between small lies and moments that seem like progress.

To discover if he’s using any one of the 19 different types of emotional abuse, take our free emotional abuse quiz.

Transcript: When He Lies About Small Things, This Brilliant Analogy Offers Insight

Anne: I have a member of our community on today’s episode. I’ve been calling her Jenna to protect her identity. You’ll hear in this interview that Jenna didn’t come to clarity because her marriage suddenly got worse. She found clarity when she finally had language for the patterns and she could see how the small lies really revealed something much bigger.

So let’s get into it. Welcome, Jenna

Jenna: Thank you, Anne.

Anne: Jenna and I have been interacting on social media for a long time. On social media, we take the concepts I teach here on the podcast and make visual representations of these concepts, usually through infographics. But every once in a while, I do a video. One of the infographics I posted was an epiphany for Jenna. It helped her see that her husband had been lying about small things, which distracted her from realizing he was also lying about big things.

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Speaking of social media, on Facebook. I’m also on Instagram @btr.org__, TikTok @btr.org, and if you search btr.org on YouTube, you’ll find me there. If you want to comment anonymously on any particular episode, let’s say this one, go to our website, btr.org and in the search bar put in the title of the episode. So for this one, it would be, my husband lies about small things.

This episode will come up. You can see the transcription and scroll down to the bottom. And comment anonymously about what you think. I always love your comments. And I interact with women on the website all the time. I also interact with women on social media.

My Marriage Was Not Healthy

Anne: So you’re following me on social media, we’re interacting online and then you see this infographic. What happened next?

Jenna: It resonated instantly with me. I thought we had hard times, but things are still getting better. I thought we were on that upward trajectory. But when I saw it on Instagram. It just suddenly clicked for me. It has two different graphs. One says, “What I thought my marriage was” and it shows a graph that goes up and down, but it has a trajectory that’s going up. Then, it says, “healthy, hard, healthy, hard.”

Anne: Yeah, it’s kind of like a stock market graph. It’s going up in general and healthy is when it goes up and hard is when it dips down. And when it goes back up, it goes even higher.

Jenna: It captures the experience I had exactly. Then, underneath what I thought my marriage was, it says what it really was. Instead of the healthy and hard healthy and hard points, it’s actually grooming and abuse, grooming and abuse. The grooming just gets more extreme, and the abuse stays the same. So it’s not that the marriage is improving. It’s that the grooming is just improving, and abuse is still there.

Anne: The abuse is actually probably getting worse, but you can’t go lower in a graph. So I created this infographic because that was my experience.

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RECOGNIZING EMOTIONAL ABUSE PATTERNS WHEN MY HUSBAND LIES ABOUT SMALL THINGS

Anne: I thought as we did addiction recovery, and we went to all these therapists, and we did 12 step for wives of addicts…. all the stuff that we would take a step forward and then two steps back. Because the addiction recovery industrial complex told me “He’s going to have relapses” and “progress, not perfection.” I thought, “Oh, we are improving over time, but of course, it’s not just going to be a perfectly straight line to success. We’re going to have ups and downs along the way.”

But when I finally took a step back and realized it was abuse, and that my husband lies about small things as part of that pattern, I saw that we weren’t actually moving forward at all. I was just going around in circles. What I thought were setbacks were really just more lies, more grooming, and more emotional abuse.

Let’s talk about the factors that would lead a woman to think that these are the regular ups and downs of either marriage in general, or the ups and downs of being in a relationship with a man addicted to exploitative material or maybe has a mental health issue.

Jenna: I think the actions he did were positive. He was going to church. And he participated in an addiction recovery group. He did all the things that you would think of when you think of improving. Even times when he would apologize. Or times when he would not gaslight me. I thought that was positive and thought maybe that was improvement.

Anne: Congratulations, you didn’t lie. I’m so proud of you!

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My Husband Was Lying & I Was Sticking It Out

Jenna: Seriously, it would be like, oh wow, he took money out of my wallet. And didn’t think I saw, but he didn’t try to convince me that he didn’t do that. As long as you’re going to a group, to therapy, to church, there’s this idea that just doing those things equals I’m a good person.

Anne: I think there’s also the societal idea that everything is fixable. As long as you’re willing to work on it and go to therapy. Of course, there’s going to be a solution. Many people go straight to whether their abusive husband needs therapy or an addiction recovery program. Rather than thinking, “Whoa, we need to get you emotionally and psychologically safe.”

Why Does My Husband Lie?

I was talking to my uncle the other day about my ex, telling him some details. And he was shocked. And then at five o’clock in the morning, the next day he emailed me and said, “Anne, your ex needs a treatment program.”

I just laughed, I was like, “That’s what I thought. And so that’s why I got him into a treatment program.” Because he’s abusive and he lies, treatment didn’t help him. And no one told me it was abuse, which is why I’m doing this podcast.

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Jenna: Yeah. I think there’s an idea that marriage is hard. No one’s perfect. As long as he’s working on it by going to a treatment center or going to therapy or whatever he may be doing. As long as he’s doing those things, you just have to stick it out. Those kinds of ideas, at least, were in my mind, and made it difficult for me to even consider the option that maybe not all marriages are this hard. Maybe not all marriages are abusive. I think that’s one idea that kept me stuck.

I Learn His Lies, Gaslighting & Manipulation Are Abuse

Anne: Even if you know it’s abuse, then you’re like, “Wow, it’s abuse? Okay, we need to get him into therapy becaus