A Psychologist Reveals The 3 Types Of Liars In Relationships (Beware Of The Third)
Most people treat lying as a single type of behavior with a single moral weight: someone either lies a lot or they don’t, and the amount is what matters. A 2026 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, led by researchers Tim Cole and Kellie Stonebrook, complicates that assumption considerably.
The team surveyed 567 U.S. adults in romantic relationships about seven distinct reasons people give for deceiving a partner. These were:
They then applied a statistical technique called latent profile analysis to determine whether those motives cluster into recognizable psychological types. Turns out, they do — three of them, each defined less by how often its members lie than by what the lying is actually for.
The largest of the three groups, at roughly 38% of the sample, reported uniformly low endorsement of every deceptive motive the researchers measured. Picture the moment a partner asks a genuinely unwelcome question — whether an old flame’s name still means anything, whether the budget can really support a big purchase — and the Transparent Partner answers plainly, even knowing the answer will sting a little. That instinct is simple but important: discomfort is treated as something to move through together rather than something to manage around.
What looks like simple honesty is, from a clinical standpoint, usually a downstream effect of felt security. People who feel secure in a relationship show measurably less pull toward deceiving a partner, according to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is largely why they have far less incentive to soften or withhold difficult truths in the first place. The Transparent Partner isn’t necessarily more disciplined or more virtuous than the other two profiles. They more often report the kind of relational safety that makes deception feel unnecessary rather than merely undesirable — which is a subtly different, and more useful, way to understand where honesty actually comes from.
The most common profile in the study, representing nearly half the sample, endorsed deception chiefly for self-protective and relationship-maintenance reasons.
This is the partner who, asked how a difficult conversation with their mother went, says it went fine when it plainly didn’t, because raising it again tonight would only reopen a wound neither person has the bandwidth to tend to. It’s the partner who tells a small, deliberate untruth about how a joint expense was actually spent, not to conceal wrongdoing but to avoid a familiar argument that never resolves anything regardless of how honestly it’s conducted.
Psychologists who study emotional regulation within couples have documented how frequently partners manage each other’s emotional states as carefully as they manage their own, a dynamic sometimes described as interpersonal emotion regulation.
Viewed through that lens, the Strategic Soother’s lies function less as concealment and more as a kind of relational triage — a judgment call about which truths, delivered at which moment, actually serve the relationship. That judgment isn’t always correct, and the same instinct that smooths one evening can, compounded over years, quietly starve a relationship of the friction it needs to actually resolve its recurring problems. But the underlying motive is protective rather than adversarial, which is precisely what separates this profile from the third.
The smallest group, at about 14% of participants, is the one the research suggests deserves real attention. This profile endorsed every deceptive motive at elevated levels, including ones the other two groups rarely endorsed at all — lying to manipulate a partner’s perception of events, to provoke jealousy or attention or to avoid emotional and physical intimacy altogether. This is the partner who fabricates a rival’s interest to test loyalty, or who insists a canceled plan was never actually confirmed, watching the other person’s confidence in their own memory erode.
The study links this profile to markedly higher insecure attachment and to a cluster of traits psychologists refer to as the “dark tetrad” — Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism, traits that a 2021 study published in Personality and Individual Differences found predict a higher propensity to lie, including in relationship-specific scenarios.
Fittingly, this group also reported markedly lower relationship satisfaction than the other two, consistent with a 2025 study published in Behavioral Sciences linking higher dark-personality-trait scores to lower relationship satisfaction.
Here, deception isn’t damage control and it isn’t emotional shorthand. It functions as an instrument, deployed with intent, and its cost tends to fall almost entirely on the partner being deceived rather than being shared by both people.
Set the three profiles side by side and a clearer diagnostic principle emerges: frequency is a weak signal, and motive is a strong one. A partner who occasionally softens an unwelcome truth to keep the evening peaceful looks, from the outside, remarkably similar to a partner who lies to unsettle or control, but the two are barely related once the reason behind the behavior is accounted for.
That reframes the question worth asking. It isn’t “does my partner ever lie to me,” since the research suggests nearly everyone does, in the Strategic Soother sense, at some point. The more revealing question is what the lying seems to be for. Comfort and conflict-avoidance point toward an otherwise well-adjusted, securely attached pattern.
Manipulation, provocation or a persistent retreat from closeness point somewhere considerably more consequential — and, per this research, tend to travel alongside a broader personality and attachment profile that shows up in a great many other places in the relationship, not just in the lies themselves.
Wondering your partner’s fibs lie in which type? Find out how many warning signs are already hiding in your relationship with this science-backed test: Relationship Red Flag Test