My Dad wasn't in "the war" and You Don't Really Like Nickelback.

I grew up with a sociopath for a father, he was (and most likely still is) a con man. We moved around, he married and remarried numerous times, he was always working on a new plan and a new con. This taught me a myriad of amazing life skills, one of which, was reading people. The other side to the "I can read people" coin was my intense need for people to be real with me. I lived with a nutjob who was constantly pretending to be someone and something he was not, so when I made friends or dated women, I wanted and needed them to be absolutely honest with me about who they were. The problem with that is that we as a species are entrenched in the falsehoods of our personalities. We are who we want to be, or at least we try to be those people. We are raised this way since the day we are born and it's not an easy thing to try to get a person to just slough off. I'd start dating someone and soon our interactions would turn more and more into something resembling an appointment with a psychologist. I'd try to dig down into the psyche of my girlfriend and get them to admit who they really were so I could see the "real" person. A wonderful outcome of such an act is that IF I did actually get the "real" person to appear, it wasn't a fun event at all. People are fragile, insecure, angry and detached at their core because reality is a scary place. I think the root of it all is that we are all going to die, everyone you love right now will be in the ground at some point rotting. They may die a horrible death or they may die naturally, it doesn't matter as much as the fact that they, and you, will cease to exist. This truth on it's own is something we as humans have had to learn to keep out of the forefront of our minds, we cannot walk around every day thinking about it. This is such a huge overwhelming issue it would dominate our world if we were to think about it and hence we could not function worrying about our eminent demise. So we learn to fool ourselves, we learn to deceive and we first learn to deceive our own mind and the rest comes easier. We are taught to believe we are more than we are, "fake it until you make it". We are taught, "if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all". There are a million examples of how we teach ourselves to not be ourselves in order to survive in civilized society, but omission is still lying (I've been told by legal type people). So we're ok with lying and we're ok with bullshitting ourselves and our friends and family let alone total strangers. These faux personas bug me, they niggle at the back of my mind, they make me want to probe deeper and try to free the real person waiting inside. This usually takes an intense conversation where the person in question gets very, very defensive. No one wants to just give up their deepest darkest secrets, their vulnerabilities, that would somehow mean they've lost something. Unfortunately, without this, I cannot rest. I am not capable of thinking someone is fooling me, it's too deeply ingrained in me to get people close to me to be the most real version of themselves, obviously because I don't want to be hurt. Ironically I myself am a bullshit artist supreme to most of the world and the other edge of the sword is that with the ones I love I am so honest that it's upsetting. I am all emotion laid bare with no preconceived notions of happiness or confidence, I am literally an open book when I am with my wife and it's a scary upsetting book of reality. Add this amazing personality to me constantly trying to drag out my wife's "real" self while she's kicking and screaming to protect her inner vulnerabilities and its' a fun circus like atmosphere at our house all the time, you'd love it there's popcorn!