As honest as we may try to be, there will always be secrets that are held back from those we love due feeling that the secret would be hurtful to them, seemingly unnecessary for them to know, or because of plain old forgetfulness. But which secrets do you keep from your lover? Do you hide secrets from your Wife? Your Husband? At which point do you start to disclose the dirt in your life to the person close to you in a relationship or marriage?

When this question was posed to a few folks out there, some interesting responses came back:

Yes, because I told him a secret, and he told his friends. It wasn’t even my secret, which made me feel even more betrayed. He can’t keep secrets, so there’s no point telling him secrets. They’re called secrets for a reason, and believe me, when I say secrets, they are things so important or so horrible, that they’re worth keeping secret.

Yes.. At a company fundraiser last year, my wife headed back to our hotel room after she wasn’t feeling well. We’d been fighting that day about small things and after a few drinks I was feeling liberated. A coworker with a crush on me had sat at my table and we wandered off to look around. That night I cheated on my wife. My coworker was able to keep the secret as we were on friendly terms and so I kept the secret from my wife as well. I love her and I feel that because I got to see the “other side”, I’ve been a better husband to her because I went through the pain of thinking what it would be like if I lost her due to this secret.

It haunts me every night, but I will keep that secret to the death…

i’m honest about everything with my SO…. except my bathroom habits. he just doesn’t need to know

No, I don’t keep anything from my wife…but don’t tell her I said that.

I don’t want to be lied to, so I won’t lie to her.

I think there is room for secrets. I haven’t told my SO (or any of the previous ones) absolutely everything about my life so its really just an omission rather than a secret. I guess if she asked I’d tell her whatever she wanted to know.

On that note though I dont see her ever randomly thinking of something unless I spurned it on.

Plenty. If I forget to tell my wife something the day it happened, I usually won’t bring it up again. The reason: if I tell my wife a day later, she assumes I’m hiding something and we argue the rest of the night. No matter what it is, she’ll assume I’m conspiring behind her back.

Little lies help smooth things over, so long as the other person believes it (and the usually do, because they’re motivated to).

Everything works out fine if no one asks questions they don’t want the answer to (and you don’t supply answers for unasked questions.) It either takes a good degree of maturity or shared psychosis.

No good can come from complete honesty. Some things are just for me, some things are just for us, some things are for the whole world.

I do. There are things that no one needs to know about me if I don’t choose to share them, and so far, I haven’t. My mind and my life are and have been too messy to explain, much less share.

No. Secrets don’t do relationships any good, in my opinion. I’m all about communication, openness, and honesty.

I’d say that don’t ask, don’t tell is probably about as best as is humanly possible. People have a right to their privacy, and feeling like you always have to be held accountable to another person’s perception of right and wrong (no matter how much you love them) about things you’d prefer to keep private eventually breeds resentment and a sense of emotional imprisonment. On the other hand, lying to the other person is a recipe for eventual disaster in any relationship.

I personally don’t keep secrets, but I don’t advertise the things I’m not comfortable talking about. If my SO asks me directly about one of these things, I assume that it’s something important to her, and I tell her the truth, no matter how mad I think she’ll get. At the same time, I don’t judge her for wanting her privacy, but if I think she’s hiding something that would directly impact our life together, I do ask, and trust her to tell me the truth. This being said, I do my best to create a safe environment for her to tell me the truth – doing my best not to judge her and instead looking forward to how we can deal with the issue together.

The biggest difficulty I think when revealing these things is conveying context – it can be very difficult sometimes for a SO to understand why you did what you did, and often life puts us in situations where the most viable choice is one that an outside observer would judge as horribly wrong. No two people see things in exactly the same way, and often that difference leads to a negative judgment about one’s morals, when in fact they made the best choice they could.

All of this being said, betrayal is something I think that should be admitted immediately, because the longer you hide it, the worse the eventual impact will be. But something like “I really dig golden showers” or “I pick my nose and eat it when no one is looking” – not terribly necessary to reveal.

I was completely honest with my SOs until I got involved with an extremely jealous one. After a lot of verbal abuse, I gradually learned to lie to her. It also taught me discretion, giving me skills needed for playing around. That’s poetic justice.

Yes. I regularly have sex with one of my coworkers. I think my wife would be mad with me if she knew about this.