Okay, Dopers in committed relationships: do you tell your spouse things other people tell you in confidence?
Here’s my take on it. I’ve always assumed that anything I told one of my married friends was likely to be repeated to his/her spouse (the exception being that I had a couple of frankly adulterous relationships before I was married, and in those cases I felt safe in assuming my married girlfriends wouldn’t be sharing.)
Now that I’m married myself, my rule is basically this: before I let someone tell me anything in confidence, I warn them that, while I won’t volunteer the info to my wife, I will answer truthfully any question she asks; so if she chances to ask me what you just told me, she is going to find out if she really wants to know; and while I am comfortable that she won’t repeat it if I ask her not to, you should decide whether you trust both Rhymers before you tell me this secret. Okay?
What about the rest of you? Do you share secrets with your spouse?
More or less. If he really wants to know something, I tell him. He’s as trustworthy as I am. Possibly more so.
Now that he’s a manager in the same company I work for, I know a lot I have to keep under my hat. And I do.
Either way, everyone knows the score. You tell one, you’re telling the other. It’s nothing personal, and we don’t scheme with it. Unless you explicitly ask me not to tell my husband, and by that point, I’m wondering why you’re telling me, anyway, if it’s that important/embarrassing to you - and it’s usually piddly trivial stuff that he would have zero interest in, anyway, and I wouldn’t bring it up in casual conversation with him… but I would keep it quiet, if asked. We tell each other pretty much everything, but we’re not gossip queens.
I guess it comes down to how heavy the subject matter is. If you’re withholding information from my husband that could help/harm him in some way, of course, consideration for my spouse comes first. If, however, I am pointing and laughing at you because I saw you slip and fall and you pissed all over yourself just before having an interview with my husband, and you were mortified and wanted to clean up beforehand, and begged me not to tell my husband that you slipped and fell because you were trying to impress me and made an ass of yourself, I’ll repress the smirk and your secret will be safe with me. Until your retirement party, that is.
Many years ago, I had met a guy, let’s call him Joe, and we were really hitting it off and beginning a relationship. One day we were in the supermarket, and we encountered one of Joe’s friends, let’s call him Sam. The three of us talked for a few minutes, just idle chatter, then we went our separate ways. The next day Joe said to me, “I just talked with Sam on the phone. I asked him what he thought of you, and he said I could do better.”
Joe never understood why I was upset with him for telling me, rather than with Sam.
Joe was a very, very honest person. Our relationship lasted three very, very long years.
Well, I agree that Joe was kind of an ass. But I didn’t mean VOLUNTEERING everything (though I can see how my thread title might be miscontrued thus). I mean, if a person other than your spouse asked you to keep a confidence, and your spouse specifically asked about the issue in question, would you keep the confidence? (Always assuming we’re not talking about things only persons with Q clearance may know.)
My wife and I are pretty open about what we tell each other – both of us can keep the conversation from going any further. But if a friend actually asked me not to tell anyone (and it didn’t concern my wife) I wouldn’t tell her. I assume she would do the same.
I don’t automatically tell my wife everything, but I wouldn’t withhold info from her that I felt I needed to relate to her, either for her sake or my own, just because I’d been told a secret.
The only exception to that would be medical confidences of patients. And there’s not much I hear there that I have a need to tell or she a need to hear anyway.
Please understand, I have no secrets from my husband. However, he deeply and truly does not care if you have an oddly shaped mole on your bum, or about your crush on Ross Perot’s earlobes, so I don’t bore him with the details. Until the moment he asks why you hate Sun Valley.
A secret is safely held by one person. When two people know, it’s no longer a secret.
Let me clarify that I am discussing personal, rather than professional, confidentiality.
Oddly shaped = Idaho, which is an old inside joke having to do with engagement rings. I forgot that Dopers aren’t actually aware of such familial weirdness.
I found out a while ago that my spouse is keeping a confidence from a friend from me. Basically, MrsSqueegee told me that her friend was going through some rough times with her own spouse. I asked why, MrsSqueegee told me that she couldn’t discuss the details, she’d promised her friend that she wouldn’t discuss it with me.
MrsSqueegee stance is she’s keeping a trust. Mine is that nobody should expect a spouse to do that, but I’m willing to let it ride. I hazarded a guess that it involved infidelity on the part of MrsSqueegee’s friend or her husband, and I was told that that was more or less the case, but again she declined to discuss it.
Its stood there for most of a year, and I’m not inclined to push things; I figure I will find out eventually, and its not crucial that I know the details right now. Or, hell, probably ever. I do trust my wife that this is basically gossip, and not something I really need to know.
Depends. If it’s some sort of personal information about a friend, then usually the understanding (in our circle) is that if you’re telling one person, you’re telling the spouse. So I’ll often tell my husband about whatever a friend of ours is going through. If it’s *really *personal female-type stuff, I’ll keep it to myself. And if a friend asked me to keep something private from my husband, I would, assuming it’s not something that ought to be reported to authorities or something.
In a professional or church capacity, however, it’s different. We have both kept information private from each other in such cases. An easy example is that my husband used to be our congregation’s financial secretary, which meant that he would sometimes be called out to sign checks for someone in need (to pay rent or something). Of course, he would never tell me who was having problems, and I would never ask. I’ve done the same.
I generally assume that anything I tell my girlfriends could possibly be told to their husbands/boyfriends, etc…and that’s never bothered me.
Case in point being a very VERY sensitive email I let one of my best girlfriends read. (This was the email my then-SO found that ended our relationship of 8 years.) I forwarded it to her email and she forwarded it to her fiance.
Do I mind? No. Would I have sent it anyway, knowing that? Yes.
I don’t tell my own SO every little thing my girlfriends tell me…usually because he would find it pointless and a bit boring and irrelevant. But if it comes up in conversation, yes, I wouldn’t have a problem telling him about it unless I was specifically told not to. I could tell him that I have definitive proof of who shot JFK and he wouldn’t tell anybody else.
The only time I’ve ever been told specifically NOT to tell my SO what I was told was when the friend in question was cheating on her husband. And I didn’t. (She didn’t want my SO to “think less of her.”)
Honestly, most of the stuff my girlfriends and I discuss are both irrelevant and tedious to my SO. And to most guys, I would assume.
I have no secrets from my husband. I don’t tell him everything, because not everything is interesting, but I don’t consider him to count in “don’t tell anyone”: this is especially true since we have bascially completely seperate social lives, so it’s not like he’s mixing with people and possibly violating confidences.
I do tell him about things I was told in confidence that he’s probably not inherently interested in because they are bothering me and I need to talk them through, and because I want an objective opinion. To me, being around for that sort of conversation is one of the main roles of an SO.
If my friend specifically asked me not to tell him, I would not mention it. If my husband directly asked, I might say, ''That’s something told to me in confidence," and he would understand. Generally, speaking to most people know, if you’re telling me something without an explicit ‘‘This is a SECRET!!!’’ disclaimer, then I’ll probably mention it to my husband. If someone swears me to secrecy or if the information is obviously something they are embarrassed by (let’s say, for example, if someone told me they have an STD and they feel humiliated by that fact) then I will decide not to tell him. He will accept that.
I too am of the school of thought that you tell one half of a married couple, just assume you’re telling both halves. I’m not big on the high schoolish “I’ve got a secret, but you can’t tell anyone!” kind of conversations - for one thing, I can’t be bothered to remember who told me what, and who can’t know. Frankly, I’d be happy if nobody ever told me a secret.
My husband, on the other hand, is not as much in my camp as I would like. He did keep a secret from me that I specifically asked about, and I didn’t like it at all. It felt like he and the person who told him something too personal were forming a unit with me on the outside. ETA: I should say, he was going to keep it a secret, until we had a discussion about how we both felt about this topic, then he let me read the email. I don’t really blame him so much as the person who shouldn’t have put him in that position.
I assume that whatever I tell my friends will eventually reach their SOs’ ears at some point. That said, if my best friend told me something that she didn’t want my (theoretical) SO to know about, I probably wouldn’t tell him (unless it’s something that affected him directly).
My relationship with my wife is more important than any other relationship I have. I would willingly throw anyone else under the bus to protect that relationship. I’ll tell them up front first though - if someone asks me not to tell anyone the secret they’re about to impart, I’ll let them know up front that (a) I don’t lie to my wife, and (b), if I think she needs to know this, I’ll tell her even if she doesn’t ask. So if you’re her sister’s husband, don’t tell me that you’ve got some action on the side.
I wouldn’t keep anything from my SO that impacted *him * in any way, but why *would * I share anything that doesn’t, if I’ve been asked not to? I don’t understand the need to share other people’s confidences with one’s spouse. It doesn’t make you a good spouse, it makes you a lousy friend.
