Fooled by Fiction

I had a friend I stopped hanging out with because I couldn’t believe her stories.

I couldn’t match them up to the things I knew to be true. The more I listened to her tell stories—stories that involved me—to other people, the more obvious it became. I was fascinated by how she twisted, manipulated, and embellished the truth into a tapestry for entertainment. Pieces of the event were accurate; the rest, dramatized. To me, it was an entirely different, wild story that I was now complicit in. A lie.

Honesty sits in my top three values, and that’s probably why this bothered me more than it would have bothered other people. We all operate from different realities and tell different versions of the same event. I get that. But sitting next to someone while they perform a version of your shared life to strangers is a particular kind of disorientation. You become a prop in someone else’s story. You might even question the reality of the relationship.

Here’s the thing about stories, though: we usually agree to be fooled.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase “suspension of disbelief” in 1817, asking readers of fantastical tales to offer “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” His argument was that if a writer could infuse enough emotional truth and “human interest” into a story, audiences would accept the impossible—dragons, ghosts, time travel—for the sake of the narrative. The key word is willing. We opt in when we buy a ticket to a magic show or comedy special, crack open a fiction novel, or perhaps even when we walk into a church, or turn on the WWE (I kid, I kid 😂). The contract is clear. We know the deal.

No such contract exists in casual conversation. There’s no formal way to ask a friend to suspend disbelief before they launch into a story, no clear moment where you agree to set aside logic so they can entertain you. That’s why my friend’s stories felt like being tricked. I hadn’t opted in.

It happens everywhere now, thanks to social media and the way people portray their lives there. The posts look real. They’re based in reality. But are they the truth?

Picture your spouse taking selfies while cooking. In the photos they take, they look neat, clean, and professional, while only you can see that the rest of the kitchen, not in the photos, is a disaster. Is it a lie? Not exactly. Not directly. That one corner really is clean. They really are cooking. But what is the post actually about? Their cooking? How composed and together they look while doing it? Both? It’s unclear. It’s vague. And that’s the point. And the problem.

No one likes unclear stories with no plot or thesis, and yet we subject ourselves to them, scrolling and watching stories for seconds at a time, over and over, until it becomes normal. Portrayal and context are missing from these snapshots, which starts to look a lot like lying by omission.

If, over the course of months, I only post selfies from the one clean corner of my house, you’d arrive one day expecting the whole place to look like that. When it didn’t, you’d be a bit confused. You could work past it, sure, but it would plant seeds. You’d wonder what else was staged. You’d start to question whether you really knew me at all.

While I opted to change my friendship, I realize I can’t unfollow reality, and I can’t opt out of the people I love performing curated versions of themselves. However, it doesn’t erase the fact that dramatized, embellished, and manipulated stories can erode relationships. For me, as someone who values honesty, these types of stories, when used in real life, destroy the assumption that what we’re seeing is real and that the people in our lives are who they say they are.