I don’t consider it gossiping if I tell Ivylad. I guess since we’re a married couple, we’re a set, so what gets told to me gets told to him.
Now, sometimes, I don’t think he’d be interested, or I forget what was told to me, but usually the “Don’t tell anyone” doesn’t include Ivylad.
That’s how I feel about it. An online female friend of my husband’s (who had already crossed a few boundaries with him that I knew about) sent him a confidential email while we were on vacation in a hotel. I came up behind him while he was viewing it, so he closed it down quickly so I couldn’t see. Let me tell you, it affected our relationship alright. I’m not a particularly jealous or insecure individual, but when I can see that you’re hiding something from me, I get to wondering what it is. I think that’s a pretty normal human reaction.
If it had been a confidential email from an old friend of his, I would have been mildly curious but not upset, but a confidential email from someone who I already know to have no clue about boundaries with a married man - it was a problem. If it had been a confidential email from someone who had no particular business sending him confidential emails (a casual friend or co-worker), I would have not liked that much, either. I would not only have wondered about the contents of the email, but also why a casual friend is looking at my husband as her confidante.
Those of you who keep secrets from your SO, do you continue to keep them if they put you in a position of acting suspiciously, or actually lying to your SO?
There is a huge difference between me keeping my own secrets from my husband and me keeping, say, yours. I am his business. You aren’t. If I were carrying on with a secret relationship, that’s his business. If my friend is carrying on with a secret relationship, that isn’t.
If someone tells me something in confidence, there are few times when that would be “my” secret. I’m not hiding anything. I don’t have to share everything I know about everyone I know in order to have a good relationship with my husband. I do have to share important stuff about myself.
I don’t lie in general.
Basically, it doesn’t come up as a conflict for me particularly. If the information is none of a partner’s business, then it either just doesn’t come up, or if it does can be dealt with with a simple statement that conveys the information that they need to know (“I’m worried about Bob”, or “Julie has some issues we’re talking about”, or “Just something on my mind, not your problem”) (that last gets “Is there anything I can do?” which either gets a “Nah” or a subject-shift like “Fix my damn Warcraft install so I can go kill pixels”).
If it is that person’s business, then it’s not a secret that I consider legitimate to keep from them – and this is how I specify my keeping of confidences in the first place. (This semi-excludes things like “I need your help planning this surprise party for Fred” or what have you, which is the only currently active sort of secret I have; I have permission from the person who is confiding in me to talk with other people about it so long as they don’t personally know any of the relevant other folks, so that if the information gets leaked it won’t get back around to the people who shouldn’t know. I cleared the one specific person I have discussed it with in advance with the person with the confidence.)
As a general rule, though, I don’t share personal information, and if I have information I’m not sharing I don’t suggest that I have it, so not sharing it doesn’t constitute any sort of behaviour change.
What’s really hard for me is spoilers for my own creative work. Because I want to talk about the shiny thing! Damnit! But I recognise that people may want to figure out the critical plot points of the webcomic I’m planning out on their own, so can’t … tell … details … argh.
If somebody tells me a secret, then that’s what it is. I don’t tell anybody. Ever. If someone trusts me enough to tell me confidential information, that’s what it will remain. Not that it happens much… but nobody is going to hear it from me.
Since the phrasing here implies something a little different from what I’m talking about, I’d like to clarify: I don’t consider keeping someone else’s (nonillegal, nonlifethreatening, not-my-business) secret from my SO as “keeping secrets from him.” Because that implies I’m holding back information he has a right to know. I would never do that.
To answer your question, if it came to the point where I might have to act oddly or lie to him to keep the secret a secret, then I would just say, “I’m sorry, there’s something that [person] asked me to keep private, and to do so, I need to [action]. I’m telling you this so you don’t think I’m weird or being dishonest.” I’m not going to escalate another person’s secret into my own relationship problem by lying or arousing suspicion. That’s silly.
The reason I don’t share others’ secrets with my SO is because I will not assume my standards of trustworthiness are acceptable to everyone. My SO may not treat the information the same way I will. I will, however, acknowledge knowing a secret to my SO if doing so avoids problems in our relationship.
Funny you mention this, because my wife and I have been in almost this exact situation in the past, and it did definitely cause waves at the time.
My view, before and since being married, is that if someone shares something in confidence with me, it’s still their business, not mine, and so it certainly isn’t my business to share that with anyone else, including my spouse. My wife, however, sides with a lot of you in that we are a single unit and that one is entitled to know everything that the other knows. This really became a problem for us as an online issue because if I was chatting with someone who was confiding in me, I would have a tendency to minimize the window if I felt like my wife was reading over my shoulder or looking at my screen. Like featherlou, my wife was not the least bit fond of feeling like I was hiding things from her, which is certainly understandable.
While we both try to respect and understanding of the other’s viewpoint, finding a practical compromise isn’t easy. In terms of dealing with the online issue, my wife has made a tremendous effort to be patient with me when I’m tweaky about what’s on my screen. However, I have also tried to just avoid conversations like that online in general and adopt the attitude that whatever is on my screen is fair game. I don’t enjoy hiding things from her any more than she enjoys having them hidden, and I’d rather put off those kinds of conversations with friends than cause agony in my marriage. But I freely admit that it has taken me a long time to get to that point, and I’m still nowhere near perfect about it.
In terms of just generally keeping someone else’s secrets from her, we’re making strides in that direction, too. I’ve tried recently to remember to ask people if they mind me talking to my wife about whatever they’re sharing with me. And my wife now asks me if I mind if she shares something with me that someone else has confided to her, because she knows it can definitely bother me if she is telling me other people’s secrets.
I don’t know that I see one grand, neat solution for us because we hold such different views of what’s appropriate in this circumstance, but I think we’re working with each other as best as we can.
Here’s my view (and I’m married).
If someone tells me something in complete confidence, I keep it that way. If my wife begins to suspect something, or asks if I know about it, I will tell her that I do know something, but it’s been requested that I keep it in the strictest confidence.
Relationships are built on trust. I ask her, quite simply, to trust that if it were something important and earth-shattering, that I would share it with her. If not, I’ll keep it in confidence until I am sure it is no l onger necessary. If your relationship doesn’t have this sort of trust, I’d suggest examining why.
All of you folks that say “there are no secrets” between your SO and yourself, would you tell your SO what their birthday or Christmas presents are if they asked? Those are secrets too…It sounds to me like the SO just wants to know some juicy gossip about someone, and that’s precisely the sort of thing the cousin wanted to avoid.
In the instance where the OP was asked not to tell his SO, he was right not to tell her, because to do so would break a trust he has with his cousin.
Good luck resolving this one, though ** Chao **. I hope you can get through to your SO that you have a reputation for being a vault when it comes to secrets, and that’s not a reputation you want to lose should it become known that you guys are sharing secrets.
I have had SO’s that can’t keep a secret. I hated to be told a secret because that put me in a box.
My SO (wife) can and does keep her mouth shut and does think before spouting off, even in anger.
We sahre, makes our lives better.
Now about things I learn that I shouldn’t. They are not told to me, I was just in the wrong place at the right time to see-hear-read something, this is mostly in the past before I met her and we do not sit down and do minute by minute rehash of our past lives on secrets about people dead and gone, living on Antarctica who they will never meet and I have no occasion to think about or bring up.
I also subscribe to the theory that is ANYONE knows about it except me, it is not a secret. Same with online stuff. If it is online, it is defacto known by others.
We have no fixed in stone rules as there will always come a situation that makes a liar out of you.
We just do not fear the others ‘black’ places on the soul.
An SO who can not think before speaking in the heat of the moment when told not to ever let this secret out and then does so, not to just anybody, but in a manner that causes others harm is automatically out of my trusted loop even if she is my wife. My ‘forgetter’ works real good, it always has.
I have had SO’s that can’t keep a secret. I hated to be told a secret because that put me in a box.
My SO (wife) can and does keep her mouth shut and does think before spouting off, even in anger.
We sahre, makes our lives better.
Now about things I learn that I shouldn’t. They are not told to me, I was just in the wrong place at the right time to see-hear-read something, this is mostly in the past before I met her and we do not sit down and do minute by minute rehash of our past lives on secrets about people dead and gone, living on Antarctica who they will never meet and I have no occasion to think about or bring up.
I also subscribe to the theory that is ANYONE knows about it except me, it is not a secret. Same with online stuff. If it is online, it is defacto known by others.
We have no fixed in stone rules as there will always come a situation that makes a liar out of you.
We just do not fear the others ‘black’ places on the soul.
An SO who can not think before speaking in the heat of the moment when told not to ever let this secret out and then does so, not to just anybody, but in a manner that causes others harm is automatically out of my trusted loop even if she is my wife. My ‘forgetter’ works real good, it always has.
So good you forgot you posted already? 
My husband and I aren’t on exactly the same page on this, and we are working on it. I still see it as no one’s secrets are more important to me than he is, and he sees it a lot greyer - that people do tell him things in confidence, and he will keep other people’s confidences, and it has nothing to do with our relationship.
As a rule, I don’t share confidential information with other people. It doesn’t matter if it’s my wife or someone else. I share almost everything about me with my wife, but other people’s information is not mine to share. I side with you, The Chao Goes Mu, in this situation. I’ve gotten a bit of flack from my wife (back when she was still my girlfriend) for not telling her things that she later found out from another place. I pointed out to her that the reason she found out at all was because someone else couldn’t be trusted. I had kept my mouth shut. If someone tells me something and says that it has to remain secret, it stays with me. That’s why people tell me things that they wouldn’t tell other people; because they know they can trust me. To me, trust isn’t equivocal.
Something that is not specifically mentioned as being secret is implicitly left up to my judgment, but I’ve found out that my judgment is more strict than many people’s. I strip any identifying information and generally don’t tell anything to anyone who might know the person. I’ve shared entertaining situations that happened to someone else with people, but unless you actually knew the “secret” already, there’s no way you would ever know who was involved. It’s very unlikely to be anyone you know if I’m telling you anything at all.
If I’m sharing guy stories about past girlfriends – even though I haven’t been in contact with even the most recent one in years – I still won’t tell anyone anything that might identify which girlfriend I’m discussing. Yeah, I might tell the guys about one girlfriend’s preferences, or something I did in bed with her, but they have no idea which one I’m talking about. It could be my last girlfriend, or it could be my first, or one of the many in between. That’s the point, none of the information leads to identification.