Keeping Secrets
Keeping secrets can do enormous damage in a marriage or, for that matter, any personal relationship. The cost of keeping secrets is one of the key themes I explore in my novel, A Fitting Place.
It is a subject I know well.
Over the years of my marriage, there were a thousand times I chose not to share my ideas with my husband. Sometimes it was as trivial as my desire to stop for lunch when I thought he wanted to keep driving. Sometimes it was more substantive … the kind of house I wanted to live in, or the kinds of food I preferred to eat. Sometimes it was an awkward subject … what I wanted from him by way of emotional support or sexual gratification.
As with more conventional secrets (e.g., an adulterous affair, an addiction), my unwillingness to reveal myself was driven by a fear of what he would think. Beneath that fear was a belief, instilled by a hypercritical mother, that how I felt and what I wanted was silly or childish or immature.
As too often happens, I carried this relationship with my mother into my marriage, projecting her scornful attitude onto my husband. It was not long before I started to read every difference of opinion as criticism, to live in fear that he “wouldn’t love me” if he knew that … [you can fill in the blanks].
To avoid the criticism and scorn I imagined he felt, I let him make most of “our” decisions and articulate most of “our” opinions. Day by day, I drifted farther away from the thoughtful, interesting and often opinionated woman he’d once wanted to marry. By the time we left for the journey recounted in Sailing Down the Moonbeam, I had become a cipher, an empty shell in the role of a wife.
And, of course, I blamed him for being controlling.
Our divorce, when it came, was all the more painful because I was in a foreign country where I knew no one and I had no support systems. But it also meant that, for the first time in my life, I had no one to tell me what I should think or what I should want or what I should do … no one to tell me that I was silly or stupid or childish.
At age 45, I finally stopped keeping secrets. I finally took control of and responsibility for my own life. The world has been a much better place ever since.
Are you a keeper of secrets? Have you been a keeper of secrets in the past? How did affect your relationships?
This blog continues the discussion on themes in my novel. I welcome comments and guest blogs from my readers based on their own experiences. Let me know if you’d like to do a guest blog on one or more of the issues relevant to A Fitting Place.
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