Lies to tell when someone asks about your summer

By Frankie Hart, September 3 2019 —

Everyone is settling into their fall schedules, which means one thing — swapping summer stories. But here’s the thing: you didn’t do a single thing that makes for good conversation. Whether you took unremarkable summer classes, chipped away at your summer job, took an ultimately disappointing trip or just stared at the wall these past few months, here’s some lies you can tell the next time someone feigns interest about your whereabouts:

You had a very personal and spiritual epiphany about the meaning of life:

The trick with this lie is to be incredibly vague. The important thing is not what you did on any physical level, but simply that you had a significant emotional journey that has caused you to completely reconsider everything you once thought about being human, or whatever. Hopefully they’ve just tuned out at this point. But I’m sure they’re happy to hear that you’re feeling fulfilled, or however you are feeling about your ‘revelations.’

You went on a very lovely vacation and have very legitimate photos as proof:

For this lie, you will require Photoshop skills or be willing to pay someone who does on Fiverr. It’s pretty straightforward — just slap some photos of yourself onto some backgrounds from the destination of your choice. Wow, it’s like you’re really there! To make it extra believable, post some of the pictures on Instagram (with the correct location tag!) before you even expect to be questioned on your summer activities. With such elaborate planning, surely no one will see through your ruse.

You had an incredibly intense, yet brief summer fling:

If you’re going to tell a tall tale, might as well get them emotionally invested. Describe in detail this amazing girl you met on Tinder only to find out she was just here on vacation. Though your time with her was short, it was passionate and made you feel alive. However, you ultimately decided not to trade any contact information, as it would ruin the mystery and intrigue of your encounter. And thus, like two ships in the night, you parted ways. You’re choosing not to cry because it’s over, but to smile because it happened. It’s just too bad that she lives in a different country and you’ll never see her again and no, you don’t have any photos because you deleted Tinder shortly after your time together out of respect.

You visited family from an obscure location:

This one’s pretty easy to pull off since you can make things up without having the fear of being corrected. Just say you went to some place no one knows about, like rural Sweden. Anything you say can be brushed off as ‘how they do things there.’ It’s a small, isolated community? Okay. You weren’t allowed to take photos? That sucks. Ritual death? That seems like a bit much, but I’ll try to keep an open mind.

This article is part of our humour section.