You told yourself it was kindness. Or protection. And maybe it was. But you are here, which suggests some part of you is not entirely convinced. The question of whether it is ever acceptable to lie to someone you love is not abstract. It arrives in specific situations, with specific histories, and with the specific knowledge that the person on the other side of the lie trusts you.
Three thinkers on the Consilium roster would approach the question from very different angles.
Chekhov: what gap is the lie filling?
Anton Chekhov was a physician before he was a writer, and he brought a diagnostic instinct to both. His stories are full of people who lie to each other with the best intentions, and who in doing so create small closures that seal off possibilities neither party can quite see. He was not moralistic about lying. He was interested in what it reveals about the structure of a relationship.
The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.
Chekhov would not ask whether the lie was wrong in the abstract. He would ask what the lie is covering. If you cannot tell the truth to someone you love, there is a gap between you, and the lie is not just protecting them from information. It is also protecting the relationship from having to be what it would need to be in order to contain the truth. That gap is worth understanding, whether or not you ultimately choose to tell the truth.
Dostoevsky: the motive is not what you think
Fyodor Dostoevsky was relentlessly interested in the gap between what people tell themselves about their motives and what their motives actually are. His characters lie to protect others, and almost always discover, eventually, that they were also protecting themselves: from guilt, from conflict, from the difficulty of being fully known by someone. The lie called kindness often has another name underneath.
Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.
Dostoevsky would push hard on the self-deception angle. Not to accuse you, but because he genuinely believed that the lie you tell yourself about why you are lying is usually more dangerous than the lie you tell the other person. If you are lying to protect them, you should be able to say clearly what you are protecting them from. If the answer gets vague, that vagueness is information.
Spinoza: understanding changes the feeling
Baruch Spinoza would not give you a rule about lying. He was more interested in the emotional architecture of the situation. His view was that emotions we do not fully understand have power over us that emotions we understand do not. When you form a clear and distinct idea of what you are feeling, and why, the feeling transforms. It does not disappear, but it stops being something that happens to you and becomes something you can work with.
An emotion, which is a passion, ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.
Spinoza would apply this to the impulse to lie. The feeling that you cannot tell this person the truth, that the truth would be too damaging, that they cannot handle it, that it would destroy something precious: these are powerful feelings. But they are not necessarily accurate. Examining them clearly, asking what is actually true about the situation versus what you fear might be true, changes what the right action looks like. He would not tell you what to decide. He would say that the clarity of your understanding of the situation should precede whatever decision you make.
Where they locate the problem differently
Chekhov would say: diagnose the gap the lie is filling before you decide whether to tell the truth. The lie is telling you something about the relationship as much as about the information.
Dostoevsky would say: be honest with yourself about your actual motive. The reason you give yourself for lying deserves the same scrutiny as the lie itself.
Spinoza would say: get clear on what you are actually afraid of. The decision you make from clarity will be better than the decision you make from the feeling itself.
What they do not resolve
None of these thinkers would give you a clean answer, because there is not one. Some lies genuinely protect people from pain that serves no purpose. Some truths are told in the name of honesty that are really about the teller's desire to be relieved of the weight of knowing.
What they would each insist on is that you know, as clearly as possible, which kind of situation you are in. That clarity is not a guarantee of the right choice. It is the prerequisite for making one honestly.