Should there be total honesty in a marriage? Or should you hide some things… e.g. if you used a bit of porn, or have an attraction towards a friend or celebrity… or find some aspect of your partner’s appearance not so attractive…
Any partner that has a penis should reveal the fact.
There’s a difference between honesty and verbalising every thought that enters your head.
So if you walk past a hot girl and think to yourself, ‘Wow, she’s hot,’ that’s fine, nothing wrong with that, but you don’t need to say it out loud. We all have private thoughts and that’s okay. We are not obliged to share every thought with our spouse.
Honesty means providing truthful information when it is asked of you. But there are different ways to answer honestly, like brutal honesty versus thoughtful honesty.
An example: your partner has heinous feet and says 'I don’t like my feet, do you think they are ugly?
Brutal honesty response: ‘Yes, I think they are ugly.’
Thoughtful honesty response: ‘They may not be your best feature, but I love you all the same!’
Can you see the differences I’m trying to explain here? That is,
(a) being honest versus saying everything that comes into your head
(b) being thoughtfully honest versus being brutally honest
So in the following thread maybe I wasn’t really being dishonest?
I just didn’t update my wife with the latest information… she didn’t ask me again what I thought anyway…
Too long, didn’t read. Something about crockery and who did/didn’t like it or changed their mind about liking it?
If you used to have an escort service, just keep that to yourself probably. Better yet, don’t used to have an escort service.
If you want my opinion the issue about the cups was totally overblown, it was basically a silly non-issue. Ask yourself whether your wife would feel betrayed or hurt should the issue be revealed.
Occasionally I’ve been annoyed my wife did something trivial, something that could easily be remedied or that I wouldn’t even remember the next day. I don’t see any benefit to confronting her over it.
But dude you do have some serious issues with your marriage assuming you are being truthful here, things like saying your wife repulses you. If you don’t love your wife, or are not attracted to her at all, THAT is what demands honesty not some nonsense over cups.
You’re the guy who kept saying your wife was “a 5” but "that she’s the best deal you can get, so you married her anyway, right ? Because of your own mental issues? IIRC, you kept telling us that you told your wife as much, but that she didn’t care. And you may have been right all along, after all, she married you.
You seem to be a little on the Asperger (autistic) side. Aspies tend to have difficulty if they cant bluntly say the truth. Tact is hard for them. So I don’t think ordinary rules apply in your situation. **Sandra_nz **'s advice is very good, and if you try follow that, you’re got 95 percent of the honesty issue covered. For the rest, its up to you and your wife.
BTW if my wife asks me what I’ve been doing on the internet I often just tell her one minor thing I’ve been doing or say what I’ve been doing in the past…
I’ve already told my wife about that… I’ve also told her about a sexual experience I’ve had that is quite a lot worse. BTW recently while in the presence of my wife and his wife, a guy asked me how many times I’ve been to brothels. I said twice and he told one time that he couldn’t get it “up” at a brothel but still had to pay.
She’d probably just feel annoyed - the whole issue annoys her.
I saved quite a lot of clutter in the cupboard.
I said some aspects of her repulse me.
I love her and having some repulsion doesn’t mean a total lack of attraction in other aspects.
OK, I need to add an addition to my original post. And that’s the concept of ‘over-sharing’. Do you know what over-sharing means?
Maybe I over-share here but I try not to with my wife.
BTW she was also the first girl I held hands with, etc, which happened when I was about 28.
One of my psychiatrists thought that… BTW it was only after I read a book about body language that I realized the importance of eye contact. In home videos of myself as a kid I never made eye contact with my dad and the video camera.
I know about how to say things diplomatically, etc. But also I sometimes want to get to the core issues… e.g. about whether I hate something or whether it merely isn’t my favorite. BTW I used to assume that girls who said that it didn’t suit to meet up with me had the problems that they said they did (e.g. that their problem was that they didn’t know my friend to visit my friend’s house). Their main reason would have been that the girl wasn’t attracted to me. One told me that she just likes me as a friend - yet she never replied to my letters, etc.
BTW just then I was watching TV with my wife. She wanted to know what was wrong. I couldn’t tell her that I was talking about her on the internet since today or yesterday she told me not to. So I just tried to shrug it off. She kept on asking. She asked if I’ve been bad and I said sort of. Then a bit later she said I was good.
And just then my wife said that she wanted to be very thin in a year like a girl on the TV… I said I’m proud of her.
No…no. I was just sharing a personal TMI revelation I’ve been told. A guy who actually ran the escort service, not was a client of it. It was before I met him and I’d have preferred not to have known. Not that it would have ultimately made any difference, and not that it was particularly surprising, but just…gross.
Well, if you want our help (and I’d assume that threads like this indicate that you do want our help, or at least want us to share our thoughts and opinions with you so you can compare them to your own ways of thinking) then you need to stop the over-sharing here.
It puts people off helping you and makes them more likely to ridicule you. Just because this is a message board, doesn’t mean the basic social rules don’t apply.
Sorry I skim-read your post and didn’t pick up on that.
Well I didn’t reveal my bad sexual experience that is worse than going to a brothel… so I don’t think my over-sharing is that bad in this thread.
In this thread I am asking people about their own experiences - i.e. so they share about what they think you should hide or reveal…
I could have easily talked more about whether I have been using porn lately, etc.
Well I guess mentioning the things I could have mentioned is also oversharing.
Anyway I find it helpful to bounce ideas off of other people… since you don’t think I should be brutally honest with my wife I want to be more honest in some other way. Like to myself.
BTW I believe that there are stages in life where people are learning boundaries… so initially they might have some inappropriate behaviour… I’ve found that a lot of the naughty kids at school ended up having good skills with people and/or women… by testing boundaries people can learn how to be more interesting and controversial. BTW with my wife we joke a lot sexually. I started life very shy and at the 4th year of university I finally started to act boldly… though it resulted in a manic episode. Sandra might think that’s oversharing but it is an important stage in my life. Mental illness has a lot of stigma. I’ve lost years of my life due to mental illness. Being able to share things here makes me feel less ashamed of myself and more self-confident. Self-confidence seems to be attractive to my wife. Being attractive to my wife is important so that she does a lot of the initiating sexually. I could easily say more on that subject.