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SaidAchmiz comments on White Lies - Less Wrong
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Having the truth upset you, and being angry at a person for telling you the unpleasant truth, are two very different things.
But there are times when both are appropriate. Example: "did you strangle my puppy?" It's hardly unreasonable to expect an honest answer and then be angry at the person when the honest answer is "yes."
More generally, it is not inherently contradictory to expect total honesty and to be occasionally angry at what that honesty reveals.
In that case, you're not angry at the person for telling the truth, you're angry at them for having strangled your puppy. Similarly, in the love example, the problem isn't so much the fact that B told A the truth, the problem is that B had systematically lied to A in order to get sex before. In neither case are you actually angry at the person for telling you the truth, you're angry at them for committing a separate moral wrong.
This seems different from "did you like my play", since disliking a play isn't a moral wrong by itself. In that case you really are angry at someone for telling the truth.
I personally am not so much of a saint as to only get mad at people for moral wrongs. I can absolutely see myself getting angry at a close person for not liking a book I wrote / play I directed / whatever. It still has nothing to do with truth -- I want them to be honest, I just want them to honestly like my stuff! (Of course that isn't entirely mature and fair, but people get their emotions all tied up in their artistic work).
That's exactly my point. And I conjecture that what upset Chris's girlfriend was the fact that her boyfriend wasn't impressed by her friends' acting. I could, of course, be wrong. If her problem was simply that he'd been tactless enough to tell her what she asked him to tell her, then indeed she was bring grossly unreasonable.
If that's indeed what upset her, then she was also being unreasonable. Consider:
If so, then his reaction is information that the acting is bad. Being angry at the messenger who is conveying this information to you is unreasonable.
If so, then what his girlfriend has just found out is that their tastes don't entirely align in this arena. Being angry at Chris for this revelation is, also, unreasonable.
So, in either case, being angry at your boyfriend for not being impressed with your friends' acting is unreasonable.
Unless, of course, you take the view (as did another poster elsewhere in the comments) that one may, and should, alter one's opinions on the basis of what one thinks will please one's close ones. I strongly reject such views.
It could be that she thought the most likely explanation for him not liking their acting was because he had unrealistic expectations or didn't watch the show with an open mind.
Both of those suggestions confuse me.
"Their acting sucked. I expected it to be good!" "Well, that was unreasonable of you! Clearly, you should have expected it to suck!" "Oh, well, in that case... yep, it sucked."
???
What on earth does that mean...?
More like:
"That show was not in the top 30% of all entertainment I have ever consumed."
"...How was it as amateur theater goes?"
"Oh, easily top fifteen percent there."
The open-mindedness criterion is a little harder to explain.