But there are good lies and bad lies. I’ve been married twice before. The only time I’ve ever been deliberately spat on was by my second wife in the parking lot of our daughter’s elementary school. We were separated, soon to divorce, but we were at that stage when you’re almost more intimate, in a sickening way, than when you were married. The gloves are off: You can say anything to each other. “I wish you were dead!” she screamed. A man looked at us and then crossed the street. “You are the worst thing that ever happened to us! I wish you would leave and never come back!”

She was in the right. About a year before this argument, I had been at an academic conference and had met a colleague for coffee. By the time we were back in my hotel room, I was still telling myself: I am a happily married man. I am not going to have sex with this woman. I lied to myself all the way up the point when she said, “Let’s get into bed.” Like so many people who have started a disastrous affair, I’m still not sure why I did it: vanity, mostly, I think. I felt flattered by her desire. When the affair finally came to light, my marriage was over.

What concrete advice could I offer the younger me, who got into that bed and forever damaged the lives of his wife and daughters? Don’t cheat — of course. Examine your intentions. Of all the things I did wrong, the worst was not that I told lies. The self-deception and denial didn’t help matters, but my real failure was a lack of care and commitment.

My ex-wife and I are very good friends now, and I’m grateful. We care for each other enough, once again, to lie when we need to do so.

When it comes to love, both honesty and deception should be practiced in moderation. Only then can we celebrate the intoxicating illusions of love. Odysseus, Cleopatra, Scheherazade, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Molly Bloom — all of our greatest lovers have been fabulists, equivocators, promoters ... liars. Even Penelope, that great model of fidelity — do we really believe that she kept all those suitors around for 20 years just by weaving and unweaving a tapestry (itself a deception)? Or was weaving by day and unweaving by night Homer’s metaphor for the much more complicated — actually, much simpler, more human, more believable — activity she was truly engaged in?

Love is a greater good than the truth. No marriage, no parent’s love of a child should be scrutinized like a pathologist examining his cadaver. Save your ruthless pursuit of the truth for the laboratory; we lovers would rather be like Shakespeare: “Therefore I lie with her and she with me / And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.” Don’t worry so much about ferreting out the truth. Take care of each other instead.