TOEFL INDEPENDENT ESSAY

Hello, please give me feedback on the following essay, and estimate what my TOEFL score for this essay (1-5) would be. The prompt was: "Always telling the truth is the most important consideration in any relationship."

People have long regarded honesty as one of the most important virtues in any interpersonal bond. Personally, I believe that always being truthful is the essential factor in all relationships. I feel this way for two main reasons, both of which I will explore in the following essay.

First of all, complete honesty strengthens the trust between two people. When you tell your friends, your colleagues, or your family something truthful, the people you shared the truth with will feel exponentially more comfortable to confide in you. Therefore, you can make more meaningful connections with people you truly care about. My own experience is a compelling example of this. When I was younger, I used to have this strong, seemingly insurmountable one-sided affection for someone else. At first, I struggled over what to do with those overwhelming feelings. Moreover, I hesitated in sharing my story to my friends, fearing they could tattle-tale it to someone else. However, knowing that I could not keep my feelings to myself for that long, I began to tell one person after another. Soon enough, I started to feel like I have genuinely forged unbreakable bonds between me and the people I had confessed to. The majority of those bonds are still strong, even to this day.

Secondly, were I to persist in lying for too long, in order to hide an unsavoury truth, the consequences await will be more dire over time. If I were to tell the same lie repeatedly, I will get caught up in a web of deceit - a web that I have made. Soon enough, the truth will come out, and the anger, the fury and the frustrations will be multiple times larger than if I came clean in the first place. For instance, one of my classmates used to be one of the few people I could relate to in my class. However, to my surprise, I learned that she has been spewing lies and harmful rumours about one of our mutual friends, both within my class and throughout the entire school. Upon learning from this fact, I began to dissociate myself from her and her lies, and I terminated my close friendship with her. In hindsight, and taking the consequences of her actions into account, I considered myself wise to distance myself from such a toxic person and a pathological liar.

In conclusion, I strongly believe that always being honest is the most important cornerstone to all relationships. This is because being honest greatly strengthens bonds, and it brings about the least bad consequences.

Thank you very much for your feedback!