All of us have our insecurities, and some of us have our secrets. Sometimes we share these with the ones we love, and sometimes we feel trapped, ashamed or simply unable to do so. Sometimes our insecurities are just the random issues of self-esteem or feeling like we’re not good enough in anything we do, often as a result of our childhood or just bad experiences as a young adult or teen. And sometimes we don’t share things because we’re ashamed of something that we feel others wouldn’t understand. Even those we love and hold close to our hearts.
To the one who later learns of the insecurities or secrets, it feels like a betrayal of the love and trust and everything they hold dear in the relationship. It’s not about the actual thing not shared. It’s about the other’s inability or unwillingness to share it. Some people have a hard time understanding this, and focus only on why they didn’t share it. They don’t understand that the other person, the one who feels betrayed, doesn’t really care about that so much. They only care that the choice was made to keep this issue from them.
In relationships we’ve always said that communication is key. Communication means not just talking about the easy, simple things in our life (”I’m angry when you say you’re going to take out the trash but then you don’t.”). It also means talking about the most scariest and difficult things in your life. Those things you may not even feel comfortable talking to yourself about, or acknowledging or giving them the time of day.
That’s a warning sign, too. If you don’t feel comfortable acknowledging this to yourself, then it’s something you’re clearly not comfortable with. You have to find a way — whether through self-reflection, therapy, a self-help group, whatever — to overcome that discomfort and open up. Because communication with your significant other — “opening up” — is the only thing that makes that person different from your best friend or your favorite sibling.
If you love another with all of your heart, you may benefit in finding a way to share your most intimate, dark secrets with that person before they come out in some other, unexpected way. It’s never too late to do so. In most cases, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by your significant other’s positive reaction to your sharing.
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Links to This Article
From Psych Central's website:
Meta-communication: What I Said Isn’t What I Meant | Psych Central (8/21/2009)
5 Comments to
“Communicating with the One You Love”
Yeah, it sounds good until you share your struggle with say pornography and then she shares it with a dozen people in her Sunday School class.
“If you love another with all of your heart, you have to”
‘Love’ followed by ‘you have’ to is something in this kind of contaxt in its principle a wrong thing to say.
If my husband doesn’t want to tell me his deepest darkest secrets I need to respect that. It doesn’t mean he loves me any less, or that I’m no more important to him than his buddies or his sister.
“You have to find a way to overcome that discomfort and open up.” Feh! Everyone has secrets, and they never need to be revealed if one doesn’t feel the need or the ability to reveal them.
Perhaps you need to look inside of yourself to see why you need to have your loved one tell you all of his/her secrets.
Joery, true, and I didn’t mean to say “have to,” so I changed it to say what I meant — you’ll likely find it beneficial in the long-term, both to yourself and your relationship.
Small secrets, like I dinged the car door, these are less likely to hurt the relationship long term. It’s really the “big” secrets I’m talking about here…
I agree with the article. I was abused before I met my partner and I’ve been open with him about it from the start, though I’ve never spoken in detail to anyone before.
I’m planning to marry this man and couldn’t imagine doing so without us knowing everything about each other, good and bad, and though it’s been very hard to talk about some things, and he’s found it very hard to hear, we understand why we behave certain ways and work together around all the issues that have come to light.
I think opening up about our pasts has brought us closer together, hearing the worst things that have both happened to us and been done by us has cemented our love and our relationship and our partnership in a way that would never have happened had I not opened up about the abuse, and the shame I felt because of it.
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Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 29 Feb 2008
