Yahoo Wants To Turn Women Into Human Lie Detectors

Yahoo in conjunction with “Whore in Training” magazine aka Cosmopolitan offered up some advice on how to tell if the guy you are talking to is lying. Their post was entitled “Dating Advice: 10 Things You Don’t Know About Liars” which of course like all their other trash is displayed on the front page of Yahoo.

I read the list and here are the ten points without a description:

1. Their Legs Say a Lot

2. They’ll Give You Pause

3. Their Thumbs Betray Discomfort

4. They Can’t Lie in Reverse

5. They’ll Shrug at Odd Times

6. They Have Big Buts

7. Their Tongues Don’t Lie

8. They’ll Hold Your Gaze

9. They Can’t Adapt

10. They’ll Give You a Hand

Now my problem isn’t the list itself because most of these are standard run of the mill things that body language experts say are tells for lying. (Most of the physical traits are considered tells in poker or so I have read in the dozens of books I have read but can’t apply successfully.)

There are two things about this that bug me.

1) Telling women that these are all signs of lying and then having them apply it in their relationship is not only annoying but also dangerous. (“I thought he was lying because he was licking his lips and then he dumped me for asking 15,000 questions about his 12 mile run. Maybe looking back on it he was just dehydrated.”)

2) Some of the descriptions they use for the signs are typical Cosmopolitan shit stirring tips that ultimately are phrased to cause discord in a relationship.

Let’s take point number three as one example: “If he’s standing with his entire hand in his pockets — in other words, his thumbs are in, not out — he’s feeling nervous. It’s up to you to figure out why.” It is up to YOU to figure out why? If that doesn’t feed the psycho part of a women’s brain I don’t know what does. Why didn’t they follow that up with, “we suggest that you smell his penis for foreign vaginal secretions.”

My favorite example though goes with point four, “If someone is telling a story you find fishy, ask questions that force him to relate events in a different order. While a person who’s concocted a false story can tell it in a,b,c,d order, he’ll often find it almost impossible to tell it in d,c,b,a order.” Holy crap, there is nothing worse than getting grilled about something you did by a significant other be it what happened at work or a night out with the boys, the last thing I want to deal with is getting the initial round of questions and then having 15 more pop up like a quiz game to see if slip up.

Whatever happening to trusting someone and then if you begin not to trust him or her just flat out ask them a question? When did a relationship require you to be a water-boarding trained inquisitor?