Filed under: Relationships, Think About It | Tags: honesty, lies, marriage, maury, secrets, trust, TV
- No matter how hard you try to hide it, what’s done in the dark will eventually come to the light.
I rarely watch “The Maury Show” but I was flipping through the channels and stumbled across a “headline” that caught my attention: “Husband Keeps 3 Secrets From Psychic Wife” I thought, like you probably did, “Shouldn’t she haven’t seen it coming? She is psychic, right?” I continued watching the show and found 3 valuable lessons in the midst of the chaos which I’ll discuss over this 3-part series.
The show went on to reveal that while the couple had been together for over 15 years with 5 kids (and they had made a previous appearance) and that the husband had gotten 2 new women pregnant. They were 8 and 6 months pregnant with his children. He had also been moonlighting as a stripper (for men and women) for the last 10 or so years. What does this teach us?
Secrets will kill your relationship.
When you keep secrets from your significant other, but especially your husband or wife, you draw a line and compartmentalize them. You say, perhaps even sub-conscientiously, “You can be in, and know about, this area of my life, but this over here, no, I don’t want to tell you about. You have to stay in your corner.”
This is a fine idea for some friends; not everyone should know everything about you. That’s foolish and it opens you up to massive potential for hurt and betrayal from people who shouldn’t have the privilege of knowing those things.
I know I may be one of very few that thinks this way, but if I’m going to say, “for better or for worse” I want to know about every aspect of your life. That means I’m taking all of your better and your worse and inviting it into my life. I can’t invite in what I don’t know. I don’t have a problem with where you’ve been or what you’ve done because the past is the past, but you have got to be honest with me! (Related Post: Girl, You Are Not Your Past)
What’s done in the dark will eventually come to the light. I can’t tell you why, but that’s just how things happen. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather know you secrets sooner as opposed to later. That gives me time to process everything. Don’t tell me, like he did, that you’ve been stripping for 10 years! Why? Because then, in addition to having the trust we had broken, I feel absolutely betrayed. There’s no telling how many times you had the chance to tell me. Yet you didn’t value our relationship enough, or perhaps didn’t trust my love enough, to know that I would be able to overlook it.
Now I don’t want to trust you because I wonder what else you’ve withheld from me and you don’t want to tell me anything else because you’re scared of how I’m going to act because you’ve forced me to withdraw and process this information. It’s most likely, the beginning of the end. From this point, you’d have to wipe the slate clean, but there may be so much junk on there, it may take a long time to erase it all.
It can be extremely hard to be honest with people. I know you’re probably saying, “Yeah, that’s real easy for you to say Stuart! You bear your soul on this blog and your Twitter and your life is all over Facebook.” And I’ll give you that. You may think I put everything out there, but for anyone who really knows me and sees me “online” knows that there are plenty of things I keep private.
There’s no easy way to start to be honest, if you haven’t been, other than to just do it! Start today and make it a habit to be open and honest with your spouse and you’ll nurture and more loving and trusting relationship.
Stay tuned for Part Two when we’ll look at Forgiveness.
Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment
the BLOG of stuart mcdonald 