what do you think of secrets between partners. i don't mean partners keeping their own secrets, but rather being a secret keeper for someone else.
i've been thinking about this since a convo with b the other day. he was told something confidential by someone else, who in turn said "you can tell les, i assume you will because you're married". while i value sharing things with my partner, i feel there should be things that can be kept confidential even between partners if the situation calls for it. as i pondered this i asked brendan about it, he said he couldn't imagine not telling me something. while me on the other hand, i've kept a good number of private stories from brendan. it's not my own information, but certain contents of conversation with friends do not escape my lips. i approach sharing my friends stories on a need to know basis, and i don't think my other half needs to know those things. but mostly i recognize my friends rights to tell me things in confidence without me telling b.
brendan seemed surprised to hear that i hold words within me that i haven't shared with him. but i suppose he'd have no reason to be think otherwise. although there was one time when i had to say to him "just trust me, ok? i know more about this than you do" - implying there's information that he's not privy to, and left it at that. there've been times when he's told me something that i already knew, long before he found out. i usually just listen and say "uh-huh?" because i'm not certain how much he knows so i stay quiet or ask prompting questions to find out how much he knows - i don't want to spill any beans he doesn't already have. he doesn't seem to notice. i think this goes back to our myers-briggs personalities.
anyways, what do you think? i'm probably partially biased after being solo all those years, it always hurt and frustrated me to think of one spouse being a sieve to the other spouse. so i'm careful with the words i take in.
the edge is closer than you think.
5 comments:
I have a spin on this Les - I've always cherished my intimate friendships and likened my relationships with them to that of a marriage. Because of that view I agree that stories between friends remain between friends unless permission to share is granted.
I think you might be onto something with the Myers-Briggs thing. I say this because I am the same type as Brendan and my natural inclination is also to share everything with Jason. And that is what I always used to do. However, there came a time when I told him something that I later regretted because it really tarnished his view of the person in a way that I did not conceive of and could not undo. I am now more careful about what I share with him if it has been told to me in confidence. He has always kept conversations with friends private from me and this has not really bothered me all that much. I feel a deep respect for his reverence for trust and confidentiality. If you ever tell Jason a secret, you can be SURE it is safe with him.
private is different than secret at least in my mind and privacy needs to be protected. I feel very protective of any private or intimate information anyone would share with me. As close as I might be to my partner he doesn't need to know what anyone else has told me that's sensitive or private. Your relationship is with me not him.
as an unattached person, i think i have a sixth sense about my friends - i know who will share my secrets with their partner, and depending on the partner and the secret, i might choose not to share with that person. in general though i feel like information is on a need to know or need to share basis. some stuff that's told to us we need to share because it's too much otherwise. some stuff we need to share because otherwise the partner is missing something big. i'm not explaining well.
i hope if i told a partnered friend something in confidence that they would respect that confidence. there are things i don't want my girlfriends' partners to know about. i told my girl friends, not my guy friends.
but i have no insight from inside a partnership. i think i'd be a secret keeper though.
ps i also think that any secrets shared pre-partnership are off-limits.
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