Honesty and silence

"Why are you honest?"
"Because I can't remember the lie I made up."
"So you're honest because you have a bad memory."

Inspired by this conversation among a group of friends who assume not to possess good memories, we decided to be complete honest at a distant-related party on Saturday. Intead of complimenting things we don't approve, hiding feelings to try to be cool, or talking about philosophy but actually thinking what do you look like naked, we decided to let our hearts talk. It turned out that it took me 30 minutes to get used to my friends' honesty while we scared others away in the rest of the night.

Conversation 1:

Girl A: Can I have a look at the picture you just took of me. I hope I don't look ugly there. (Obviously, she was fishing compliments. It was a good chance that she expected such replies as "you can't look ugly at all because you're beautiful!", however my honest friend gave the following respond.)
My friend: Everyone is ugly, depends on how you define beauty.

It took A 3 seconds to shock, 2 seconds to unnaturally smile and 1 second to disappear from our eyesights.

Conversation 2:

My friend A: How often do you think about sex in one day?
My friend B: Didn't count.
A: When you see a hot babe, do you think about sex straight away?
B: Sure, definitely.

When my friend was giving the details of when and how he thought about sex, a girl walked passed. Because we didn't intent to keep this conversation as a secret, not surprisingly, we were overheard. This girl gave us a look like we're freaks and left the room without a word even a smile.

We had a great night indeed as we enjoyed each other's company so much, although we were asked to stop taking pictures of ourselves and kicked out in the end with the reason that the party is over. Consequently it made me think. We all see honesty as an important virtue of being a decent person, but how many people can really stand even appreciate honesty? We say thousands or tens of thousands of words every day (regarding to S's knowledge, thanks S!*grin*), among which how many words are from our truely heart? Less than what we think, I guess. To be acceptable in society, we have to sacrifice honesty to say sth we don't mean. To be acceptable by ourselves, we require honesty to make our mind in peace. To be a person who I am and survive in society at the same time, we need a compromise - silence. We keep different opinions to ourselves when necessary in order to have principle without the expense of offending others.

Ironically, there is a chinese phrase called silent accept, which means when you're silent, you're assumed to accept or agree. Some business people say silence can be a weapon in negotiation if it is well used; some others say silence can save embarrassment in the game of relationship; I want to say silence can be as complicated as you could imagine.