The three honesty rules my wife and I set 44 years ago, and the one house project that got me thinking about them.

Here's the thing that got me thinking about all this in the first place. Tammy is in the Philippines right now, and while she's away I've been trying to knock out a few projects around the house before she gets home. I'm not planning to tell her about any of them — the idea is that she'll walk in the door, notice them, and be pleasantly surprised. That's not lying. That's just a husband with a honey-do list and a little time on his hands.

But here's where it gets interesting. It's only not lying right up until the moment she asks me a direct question. If she calls and says, "What are you up to over there?" — well, now I've got a decision to make. And that got me thinking about the whole subject, and about the rules Tammy and I set for ourselves a long time ago.

When Tammy and I first got married, we settled a question most couples never bother to ask out loud: when, if ever, is it okay to lie to each other?

Our answer was short. The only lies allowed were the ones that involved Christmas. Over the years we've been willing to stretch that to cover gifts in general, but the idea is the same. Outside of surprises meant to make each other smile, we agreed we'd be one hundred percent honest with each other.

Forty-four-plus years later, that little rule has held up better than most of the furniture we've owned. Honesty turned out to be the easy part once we'd decided it wasn't optional.

We took the word "divorce" off the table.

Early on, we decided we simply wouldn't throw that word around. Not in arguments, not as a threat, not even as a "someday maybe" hanging in the air. We weren't going to reach for it when we were angry and wanted to wound, and we weren't going to leave it sitting there as an option we might one day pick up. We were in this for the long haul, and you argue very differently when both people already know the ending is settled. The fight becomes about solving the problem, not about who might walk out the door.

For us, that wasn't just a practical arrangement — it came out of what we believed a marriage is. We didn't sign up for a contract we could cancel when the terms got inconvenient. We entered into a covenant, the kind God takes seriously and keeps even when we don't deserve it. Taking "divorce" off the table was really just our way of saying we meant to keep our word the way He keeps His. When you understand your marriage as a promise made before God and not just to each other, walking away stops being an exit you're looking for and starts being a door you already decided to leave shut.

And then there's the one that only worked because we were broke.

When we got married, we didn't have two nickels to rub together. As it turns out, that was a gift in disguise. In those early arguments — and there were a few — neither of us dared throw anything, because anything worth throwing was something we couldn't afford to replace. Break a plate in a moment of temper and you've just lost a plate you needed for supper. So our fights stayed a little quieter, a little less violent, and we got to keep all our dishes.

I wouldn't recommend poverty as a marriage strategy. But looking back, being too broke to break things taught us something we carried long past the point when we could afford new plates: some restraint is just wisdom you stumbled into early.

So when is it okay to lie to your spouse? Only about the presents. Everything else, tell the truth, keep the ugly words out of the argument, and try not to throw the good china.

Forty-four years in, I can tell you it works.

PS. This post was created in a conversation with Claude, an AI assistant. I gave it my initial idea and suggested a few tweaks along the way. When it gave me the output, I read each word and made some tweaks, but I think it did a great job of helping to convey what I wanted to say.