Is it possible to love well without lying? Love should lead us to the truth, about ourselves and about those we love, shouldn't it? But in practice we find that love and lies often work hand in hand, and that it may be difficult to sustain long-term romantic love without illusions or even deception. Here are philosophers, psychoanalysts, neuroscienctists, a diverse range of writers on love, and scences from the life of Clancy Martin - himself divorced twice and married three times - in this exploration of how love, truthfulness, and deception work together. And it turns out that learning how to love and loving well inevitably requires lying, but also that the best love relationships draw us inevitably toward honesty and trust. Love and Liesis a provocative, wise, funny and relentlessly honest book about the difficulty of love.