"I always practice safe sex." "I've never been promiscuous." "I just had an AIDS test six weeks ago." "Don't worry, I'm on the pill." Your sex partner may be telling you these health-threatening lies just to get you between the sheets.

What's even more surprising is that people who tend to tell these types of lies believe that their behavior is unacceptable.

Sunyna Williams, a community health assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, noticed that many people rely on sexual history-taking as a safer-sex technique. So she surveyed 166 sexually active undergraduates to examine their perceptions about the acceptability and seriousness of sexual lies. Participants were asked to complete a 15-minute survey at the recruitment site, which included closed-ended questions about perceptions of their sexual lies. Then they were asked to recall a specific event where they had lied to a sex partner. Open-ended questioning allowed research assistants to code lies as risk-relevant (such as lying about sexual history) or risk-irrelevant (such as lying about sexual pleasure), and to determine if the lying was self-protective or other-protective in nature.

Williams' findings suggest that risk-relevant lies tended to be self-protective, while risk-irrelevant lies tended to be other-protective. People who told risk-irrelevant lies did so to protect the feelings of their partner, who they tended to like. They also cheated less on their partners. Those with a history of infidelity, however, told more risk-relevant, self-protective lies, and they tended to like their partners less, but they also rated their behavior as less acceptable and more serious than the risk-irrelevant, other-protective group's behavior.

"It does give you some hope in terms of how you can intervene," says Williams. "If these people didn't care, it would be a little scary."

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